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Something New for the New Year: Hybrid Scrapbooking
Tracy Sundling - Digital Deck DesignerWith the New Year, I thought I would try something new to me in the scrapbooking world—hybrid. I had figured that after eight years of traditional scrapbooking and two years of digital that this would be a piece of cake, boy was I wrong!
To make my life easier and not overwhelm myself I decided to use templates as the base of all my layouts. These templates all came from Ali Edwards Four Pack Mix and Match No 1 set. I loved these templates because of their versatility, the number of pictures they could accommodate and the straight clean lines. So the first thing I did was drop in my pictures and papers.
These first five layouts are what I created digitally then had printed to embellish with traditional supplies. In the first layout I have here, the template only had an opening for three pictures, but I had a great picture of my husband and his parents on his 40th birthday that I made bigger and put on the bottom as a focal point. The second layout is basically various pictures from the birthday party.
In this layout, I wanted to showcase a great picture I took of three of my kids while doing senior pictures for my graduating son last spring. The word art is a brush that is also by Ali Edwards from her Family Hand-Drawn Brush set. This is an awesome, versatile set to have because it has a brush for just about every relative you can think of and comes in both a brush and a png file.
These final two layouts are pictures I took at the zoo hoping for a decent Christmas card picture of my girls. I got so many great pictures that day I wanted to be able to showcase a few of my favorites. In the first one, I again used a brush that says ‘sisters’ from Ali Edwards Family Hand-Drawn Brush set. In the second layout, I first rotated the template 90 degrees so that my pictures could be placed vertically. The template had room for six pictures but I didn’t want to use six pictures, so in three of the spaces I inserted the same background paper as my frame.
Once my digital creations were complete I had them printed out as 12X12 prints and the real challenge began.
Over the past few years I have only been in a craft store a few times, so when I headed out with my five prints to pick out my embellishments, I was very surprised at the selections and even a little overwhelmed! I don’t know how long I was in my local craft store, but I do know that I wandered up and down the same five aisles until my feet hurt and my basket was still empty. I didn’t know where to start. I finally pulled out my first layout which gave me a focus.
My first two layouts were of my husband’s 40th birthday party and I wanted them to have sparkle. I had no problems finding items that referenced being old and were silver and black, but I could not find anything that had 40 on it. I found some glitter letters in many different colors but never found numbers. I finally gave up on the 40 and just went with the old theme and found these black and silver embellishments. To get the red numbers, I traced them on chipboard, painted them red and then added some fine red glitter. I found this frustrating at first because had I done this all digitally I could have chosen any font, any size and easily made it any shade of red I wanted. But once it was done I found it kind of fun to be playing in the glue and glitter again. I attached my 40 to my page with Dot ‘n’ Roller permanent adhesive from Kokuyo; this adhesive is amazing. If it gets on something you don’t want it on, you can just rub the little dots off. It rolls on smooth, with no gumming and no stringy glue trails. I was also impressed with how it adhered my heavy chipboard embellishments to the page without any problems.
My other three layouts were more frustrating because no matter how many times I walked up and down those aisles, I couldn’t find any embellishments that were close to the colors I had in my layouts. I almost think it would have been easier to find the embellishments first and then create the digital layout based on my embellishments. So much of what I saw was sold together in themes of like colors and styles, which in the end, saved me. After my umpteenth pass down the same aisle I stumbled across some tags that matched my layouts; in the same area I found my flowers and my chipboard word art which all matched each other. Once I had that, the layouts practically finished themselves. Again I used the Tape ‘n’ Roller Plus and the Dot ‘n’ Roller permanent adhesive from Kokuyo to adhere my embellishments and again I was amazed!
Will I ever try hybrid again? I don’t really know. I had a more frustrating experience with it then I had anticipated. It was a huge challenge for me, but at the same time it forced me to print out five physical layouts to put in an actual book, as opposed to in a digital file on my computer, which I have not done much of these past two years. I guess only time will tell.
Happy Scrapping!
Tracy Sundling
tracysundling@ssreflections.com
Digital Deck Crew Member
Reflections Publishing Group, LLC
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