My Scene: Rushed, No Photos, Away from Home.

Hey! It's Brook with our weekly installment of "Behind The Scenes Wednesdays".

For the past two months, my scrapbooking scene has been at my parents house where me and my family are living because of a flood at our home. It's not easy trying to get creative away from my usual routine and organized (well, kind of organized) supplies at home. It's also tough having to clean up my mess from the dining room table every night, but I've made it work. I love to have my Amy Butler (I think K&Co) bag filled with my mosy-often used tools beside me. And working on a large self-healing cutting mat makes it easy to lift everything off the table at the same time if I need to move my work-in-progress to another table.

below: my temporary scrap space on the dining room table


So, come behind the scenes with me... welcome to the chaos! LOL.

This month, I flipped through the papers & goodies in the November kit with such excitement (Oh man, wait until you see it!!!!)... until I sadly realized that I didn't have any photos on my laptop that would go with it. I have tons of GREAT photos at my house in my desktop computer (buried beneath boxes). But, since I don't have access to them I had to really use my creativity to make some photos work. A tip on that: turn any photo to B&W and it will match. Even if the photo is taken in June and the papers have fall leaves on them. ;) haha.

I've also been really busy lately with the work going on in my house so I waited until the last minute to start scrapping for the DT gallery. Talk about stressful! So I came up with a quick plan. I set up a photo shoot with the kids in the back yard and at the local playground. Then, after loading the photos, I opened up Photoshop on my computer and worked out my layouts and journaling in the program digitally. If you have any experience with digital scrapbooking, or if you own a copy of Photoshop, try this!

As you can see below, my photos were laid out in a 12x12, 300 dpi .jpg document which I then uploaded via internet and had printed at Costco. They were ready 1 hour after I uploaded them! Love Costco. Muah, muah, XOXO. Then, once I got my giant prints I cut them up and started scrapping right away. It was a little more work up front, but in the end it saved me a ton of time!

below: one of the 12x12 inch .jpg files I prepared and then the pile of photos after cutting them.




below: working on a 2-page layout with my B&W impromptu photo shoot photos and pre-typed journaling (also on photo paper).



below: a closer look at the embellies you will find in the November kit... tumble of ribbon and jar of brads are from my own stash