My Reason Why

My “Believe” Story Kit arrived in the mail this week! I always feel extra lucky to get to work with the digital version of the kit first, a definite perk of being part of the Digital Creative Team. I also subscribe to the physical Story Kits and have from the very beginning because I LOOOOOOVE them. The products are awesome (love the acrylic word each month!) and the themes always spark stories I otherwise wouldn’t have thought to tell. My favourite part of my subscription is the classroom, which includes a presentation about the theme to spark some ideas.  Why am I telling you all this? Because this month, there was this little piece of digital word art included that brought it all back to WHY I value scrapbooking/memory keeping/storytelling so much.(digital word art by Ali Edwards) Not gonna lie, scrapbooking lately has felt challenging. I’ve been lacking in motivation and energy. And I KNOW that for me, if I try to force it when I’m just not feeling up to the task, it does not happen. I don’t know why. I’ve been telling myself “maybe I’m just supposed to sit back a listen to the stories for a bit instead of telling them”. The timing of this little reminder to “make love visible” could not have been better and I’m so glad it came when it did. (Sidenote: my One Little Word this year is “Make”. How’s that for a good fit?!   🙂 )

The theme for this month’s Story Kit is “Believe”, and with the idea of using memory keeping to “make love visible”, I was more than happy to take this opportunity to cheer for Liam. Back in March, we finally got him enrolled in Karate. It’s something we had talked about since last September, hoping it would help him learn to focus and develop confidence. Last week he earned his yellow striped belt!

 I made a spread to go into our album for the year in celebration of his achievement, because I sure do love this kid!!  The left side is 6×12 and the right side is 9×12.

The front of the 6×12 is a full page photo with digital word art from the kit and a gold chipboard star from Studio Calico’s “Scout” Documenter kit. Full page photos are my favourite 🙂  I do not have a large format photo printer, just a standard size one, but I discovered a while ago that you can still print big photos as long as they’re 8.5″ or less wide (!!!). I have a Canon Pixma MG7520, but I “think” you could probably follow these steps on other standard size Canon photo printers as well.

Here’s a screenshot of what happens when I select “Print” in Photoshop Elements 13. (If you click on the photos, they should pop up larger so you can see the words on the menus more clearly). I cropped my photo to 6 x 12 at 300 dpi and added the digital word art before I selected print. Notice section 5 where it says “select print size”, I’ve got “Actual Size” selected and I do not want it to “crop to fit” the canvas, so that box is not checked. First thing I need to do is “Change Settings” in section 2: printer settings. Click on that box.

A new window pops up, and I want to select the “Advanced Settings”, so click on that box.

We’re going to make a few adjustments in the “advanced settings” window. First of all, select the option for “Standard” under the heading “commonly used settings”. This is very important, because it’s the only option that will allow you to choose a custom paper size, even though we’re printing a photo. Under “Media Type”, select the type of paper your printing on. I’m using a 13 x 19 glossy photo paper from Staples that I’ve cut down to 7×13. Next up is choosing the paper size. The very bottom of the “paper size” menu should say “Custom”, pick that one.

When this window pops up, type in the dimensions of your paper. You’ll notice that the parameters for how big you can print with your printer are included in this window (example: the custom paper size option on my printer will let me print as large as 8.5″ wide by 14″ long!) When you select a “standard” printer setting on a photo printer, that setting will print with margins on the right, left, top and bottom instead of “borderless” like you would get if you chose photo printing. So I’ve intentionally set my paper size to be larger than the 6×12 print so my photo should print as a true 6×12 (or pretty darn close anyway) without the edges being cut off. The paper is loaded into the bottom tray of my printer and hangs out over the edge by about an inch or so, but prints exactly as it should.

If you haven’t played around with your printer settings before, I think you’ll be excited by this discovery 🙂

Back to the story. The back side of my 6×12 is another full page photo (his white belt) and I’ve typed my journaling right onto it before printing.

 

The digital word art is from the “Cheer” Story Kit. I’ve also added a wood veneer piece from Elle’s Studio that seemed like a perfect fit to go along with the “I remember” sentence starters. I started and erased the journaling on this page so many times, but once I went back to the technique of starting each memory with the same phrase, it all gushed out so easily.

The 9×12 pocket page was fun to piece together.

My journaling was pretty much done on the left side, so I got to fill the right side of the page with pretty cards from the digital kit that I printed onto matte photo paper 🙂 I love that these cards work together to enhance the story and “make love visible” all on their own, without having to add anything to them.

So that’s my first Believe project. Hoping to share a few more stories and images of recent projects over the next week.

Thank you so much for stopping by! Pam