Tutorial Tuesday (Individual Style)

March 17, 2026 by 1 Comment

Challenge Spotlight: Favourite Winter Olympic Moment

So, hosting my very first Challenge went pretty well! There were six layouts submitted (including my own) and they’re all different. If you missed the Challenge I issued. I asked GingerScrappers to create a layout about their favourite moment from the 2026 Winter Olympics. And there were so many to choose from!! (I spent a ridiculous number of hours glued to my TV, very thankful to have the CBC’s commentary on all the competitors.) I’ll share the layouts with you momentarily, but first I want to reiterate my Challenge Spotlight post flow. I look at each layout to assess how it meets the Challenge‘s criteria and identify how it reflects the Scrapper‘s individual style. Each is linked to its spot in the Gallery so you can get a closer look, and maybe leave a comment for the Scrapper. Simply click on the Scrapper‘s name and you’ll be whisked off for a better view. (Any time you see text that is bold, in colour and underlined, that tells you the word or phrase is a hyperlink.)

Several options occurred to me as to how others might approach the Challenge. Would the Scrapper choose to focus on a team sport, or an individual one? Or maybe the moment WASN’T sport-specific? Would a national flag become the colour palette? Would there be a lot of themed elements to the layout? Would there be a lot of journaling? Let’s take a look!

First out of the gate (see what I did there? :D) is this layout from KatL. First impression? She’s a hockey fan. Reading her journaling tells me she’s a Colorado Avalanche fan (the team formerly known as the Québec Nordiques p)) but her favourite moment came from Team Sweden, and her colour choices reflect that. I like how she anchored her title with the sticks, and dangled the (black and yellow) skates from her photo.

Yvonne55 chose nation first for her layout. The Netherlands’ team colours are predominantly orange with touches of blue and white. The Dutch team had a really successful Games this year, as she notes in her journaling. For embellishments, she has the Olympic Rings and the flag of the Netherlands, but no sporty ones. Anybody remember reading Hans Brinker and the Silver Skates?

Somehow I knew glee would choose Nazgûl, the wolf dog, who “medaled” in cross country skiing. This was one of so many truly touching moments of the Games, and was on replay everywhere. Why did I know? Because she’s got a really quirky personality, and she lives in a place where winter sports are only ever on TV. Her layout focuses on photos, with some wintery coloured elements.

Grace. chose to focus on a sport and kept her layout elegant, which is the definition of figure skating. (The required strength, skill and determination are always secondary, although without them, there can’t be that elegance, but I digress.) Her palette is pulled from her photos, and she’s got a pair of skates and a tuque in there.

It looks like photocrazy viewed the Games through her kiddos’ eyes. She has a bunch of winter-sports related elements here, and that penguin is killing me! We who live where the air tries to kill us know about walking like a penguin. 😉 I like how that scatter behind her photos looks like snow spray.

And last, here’s what I did. One of my grandsons is a speed skater so I have a special interest in it. Canada has long been near the top of the speed-skating heap and this year was no exception. What drew me to the team pursuit? Speed! But not just that… It takes a high degree of teamwork to skate at such speeds without crashing, finely-tuned balance, strength and spatial awareness. I swear I watched that race a dozen times. For my layout, I chose colours that represent Canada – red and white – plus the dark brown the designers at LuLuLemon decided should be part of our national Olympic uniforms. (yuk) The dark background was chosen to make my photos pop and to highlight the paint splatters that ground them. The speed skate element is a clip art piece I downloaded. The Mountie moose is a nod to my son-in-law. 😉 And I just want to mention, Valérie Maltais is my new favourite skater.

That was fun! Should I host another Challenge in the future? I’m working on that zen-doodle tutorial I mentioned last week and it’s coming along. I thin it’ll go better when I get my new spectacles and can see everything more clearly… it should help a lot! I’ll be picking them up today, once I get this posted. Happy St Patrick’s Day!

 

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Blog Challenge, Challenge Spotlight, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Spotlight Challenge, Tutorials Tagged With:

Tutorial Teusday (Photoshop Elements)

March 10, 2026 by 1 Comment

Greatest Hits: A Whole New Meaning to Copy and Paste

Have you ever put your heart and soul into a layout, then spent forever coming up with the perfect journaling – only to hate the way the journaling looks, or worse… see a glaring typo? Have you ever wished PSE came with a spell-check? Or that you could copy-and-paste something from a website? Well, have I got the trick for you! Word and PSE work together! And even better… all your fonts are there in Word too! (Update: I’ve discovered that any note-keeping app on your computer will work for this! I’ve used Notepad a lot lately and was so glad I didn’t have to jump through all the Word hoops.)

Your Word version may be different from mine; the interface might look different but this is pretty basic, and all the things I’m going to show you will work with any version. I opened a new blank document in Word, chose a font and set my formatting so that my text would fit inside a border on a beautiful journaling blank I pulled from Ooh La La Scraps‘ Shabby Chic collection. (Update: Don’t worry too much about formatting. You can adjust it within your PSE text box. Same for font selection.)

I love using quotations for a variety of reasons. Like not having to think too hard! I typed out this one in a matter of a few seconds. I changed the size of the font for Mr Bergen’s name.

I just spotted a typo on my screenshot below. RATS! Word’s spell-check wouldn’t have caught it either, but it DOES catch those transposed letters, “e”s that should be “a”s and that kind of thing. It also capitalizes the first word of each sentence for you if you forget.

Then I opened up Elements on my desktop, dropped my journal blank onto a new document and set up the Text tool with the same font settings that I chose in Word. If I skipped this step now, Elements would default to the last settings I used.

Back to Word… I selected the text then right-clicked to open up a dialogue box. It looks like this. I want to Copy the text. (WSNH tip: the same keyboard shortcuts I’ve shown you in previous tuts also work exactly the same in Word, so CTRL/CMD>C will work to copy the text.)

I flipped back to Elements and Pasted my text into the journaling space. That can be done by right-clicking then choosing Paste from the dialogue box, or CTRL/CMD>V. Did you notice that Elements ignored the different text sizes?

Now I have the ability to change it up to suit my layout. I changed the text colour first by pulling the gray from the border.

Then I changed the font size on Mr Bergen’s name again. Now that I know the font size changes made in Word don’t move over to Elements, I can skip that step in the future.

Even better, it’s totally possible to Copy whole sections of text from a web site or other document on your computer and Paste it into Word. As you can see in the screenshot below, I’ve selected a new quote from my favourite quotations site.

Then I Pasted it into Word with a couple of clicks! Yeah. I wasted time resizing Ellen’s name. (Did you catch the typo in this screenshot too?)

Here you can see that I’ve got Elements open and it’s just waiting for me to Copy-Paste Ellen’s words of wisdom over.

Oh, right… I didn’t go to Elements and set up the font. So this is the font, size and colour I used for the last layout I created.

So I just Undid that step and started over. But this time I decided to use a Text Box. This handy tool helps to constrain the text so it doesn’t bleed out into areas where I don’t want it. To create a Text Box, with the Type tool click-and-drag from one corner diagonally to the opposite corner of the area you want to cover with text. This journal blank made it easy by having reference points in the border.

And then I pasted Ellen’s quote into my text box. Notice that it’s now centre-justified, rather than left-justified as it was in Word. I had “Center” selected in the Text tool settings and Elements over-rode Word.

This time I didn’t have too many changes I needed to make, other than shrinking Ellen.

But to show you how easy it is to change it to suit your purposes, I switched the angle from upright to right-italic and changed the text colour. I want to try this trick with texting on a path, but wanted to get you the basics now. Stay tuned!

I’m kicking around a couple of fun ideas for new ways to play with our stashes. Digital zen-doodles, anyone?

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Tutorials Tagged With:

Tutorial Tuesday (Potpourri)

February 24, 2026 by 2 Comments

Greatest Hits: Templates with a Twist

In addition to my Olympics hangover, I haven’t slept properly in nearly a week, so my head is pretty fuzzy. Since we were recently talking about how to add photo spots to templates, I thought maybe I’d replay this one:

Did you know that you can combine two (or more) templates into a single layout? Are you shocked? Remember, templates are amazingly versatile tools. You don’t have to slavishly follow the design for them to help you create fabulous layouts. They’re intended as inspirational guides, with symbols as placeholders. With templates, your creativity is only limited by your imagination. I’m going to show you how to do a template mashup right here, right now. Let me begin by saying I probably wouldn’t have chosen this bundle for this technique, but the opportunity presented itself and I ran with it. To have the best results with your template mashup, you should choose two templates with clusters, photo spots, masks or combinations of those that you really like, with a good amount of white space, so you’ll have lots of options.

I used a JB Studios template shown below as my base template. I like the row of circles with the small cluster, and I really like the little word strip cluster in the corner. I made a mental note of what the file was named so I could find it later…

Then I chose this Tinci Designs template (SO sad to see her retire!) for my second one. I had 2 photos I wanted to use. Now, I could have resized the centre cluster, which would have actually worked beautifully, but I wanted my photos to be really visible.

I had to make room for the section of Tinci’s template that I was going to move onto the JBS template so I selected all the layers but the background and the little wordstrip cluster then moved them up almost to the top of the canvas.

See how that gave me a lot of room?

The next step is to go to my second template and select all the layers I want to add to the first one. If you don’t have the Bounding Box turned on, you might want to do that. It will help you move only the layers you want by including the shapes you’ve selected inside it. You can see my Bounding Box in the screenshot below.

Once you’ve selected only the layers you want to copy onto your other template, right click on the Layers panel to open the Layers menu. Then click on Duplicate Layers…

A new menu opens with everything you have in your Photo Bin included. Look down the list until you find your first template. If you can’t remember the file name, look for the .psd suffix. When you’ve found it, click on it.

Your dialog box will look like this. You can rename the group of layers if you want, but you don’t have to. When you’ve got the correct file selected, click OK.

PSE automatically centres everything on the canvas, so this is what the new mashed-up template looked like right after I added the Tinci pieces to the JBS base template. Time to fine-tune!

I moved all the Tinci pieces down so the JBS pieces peeked out above them.  Then I had to figure out what to do with that little word strip cluster that HAD to be in there.

Once I was happy with how it all looked, I could get my layout rolling. There were some layers from the original template that were completely concealed, so when I came to them in the Layers panel, I just deleted them. (I always work with copies of everything, never the original. That way I don’t have to worry about losing something I might want again later!)

If you decide to try this out, remember that you don’t HAVE to copy everything from one template onto the other. Choose the parts you LOVE. Forget about the rest. I could have copied just one of the photo clusters. I could have only copied the word strip cluster. It’s all about what you like most! Have fun!

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, GingerBread Ladies, Tutorials Tagged With:

Tutorial Tuesday (Potpourri)

February 10, 2026 by Leave a Comment

Templates Everywhere… But Not the One You Need

We’ve all been there. You have a selection of photos and a coordinating kit you really want to scrap, not a ton of time, and really want to use a template to speed things up. So you run a search for a suitable template, only to come up with… none that will work right out of the folder. Maybe you have too many photos for the spots on the template, an issue GingerScrapper Joleen ran into recently. Or you have too many spots on the template for the number of photos you want to use. Well, the too-many-spots-for-photos is an easy fix. Just delete the extra(s)! But wait! The too-many-photos-for-spots isn’t a difficult fix either! Let me show you four ways to do it without straining your brain.

Of course, the easiest way of solving this problem is to simply Copy a photo spot already on the template that will work with your extra photo, then find a likely place to put it. So I’m not going to show you that.

Now, I have literally hundreds of templates from several Designers. I’ve talked about how I organize my templates a few times before so we’re not going over that again. (You’re welcome!) For this exercise I purposely searched for templates that only had three photo spots. Then I reviewed them all, looking for those I wouldn’t have to make a gazillion adjustments to in order to make them work with the four photos I have pictured below.

I selected four templates and will show you how I’ve tinkered with them to accommodate all four photos. First is this one from Dear Friends Designs. The spots are in portrait orientation but that’s an easy fix.

Don’t forget that templates are tools. They’re blueprints, but unlike blueprints, they don’t require absolute slavish devotion to any part of them. There are no rules about adding, subtracting, moving, turning, flipping or substituting any part of them. You can even merge two templates into one layout! Every single element of a template is a SUGGESTION. Okay… three of my photos are in landscape orientation so it only makes sense to Image>Rotate>90° Right the whole template.

But. It’s still not really working for me. So this time I Image>Rotate>Flip Horizontal the whole template and it’ll work a lot better.

Can you see what I did to create a fourth photo spot? Yes! I used the journal block! Dear Friends Designs‘ templates come pre-shadowed, and the white border is a Stroke contained in the Layer Style. It was a simple matter to select any one of the actual photo spots then right-click>Copy Layer Style then go to the “new” photo spot, right-click>Paste Layer Style to add a white border and matching drop shadow. To complete a layout with this template, a few items will need rearranging. You can see that I’ve moved the journaling-block-photo-spot down and tucked it into the cluster at the bottom right, plus I Rotated and repositioned the banner. The rest will come together.

This grid-style template is from Magical Scraps Galore. It’s simple, the photo spots are more or less right for my purposes and there’s an easy way to add a fourth photo. Let’s review.

This was probably the easiest conversion I did. I replaced the title block at the bottom with one of my photos, moved the title up to the journaling block and resized the middle left elements. Easy peasy!

This template is from Tinci Designs. Might we take a moment to mourn the loss of such a prolific and generous talent? Retirement comes eventually for all of us, and we’re really going to miss her. Back to the task at hand. Here, I’ll need to do some photo spot resizing and a little tweaking, but it’ll definitely work.

But first it needed Image>Rotate>90° Right, then Image>Rotate>Flip Horizontal.

Again, I used the journal block as a photo space, which may or may not need a white border and drop shadow. The title can cover up that nasty fake snow in the top photo. The photo spots were all resized in one dimension or both, to suit the photos better. But doing so didn’t mess up the overall look. Tinci‘s templates are really easy to customize.

My fourth option is this template from Connie Prince. At first glance, it doesn’t look like it’ll work all that well. But I know that Connie‘s templates use a paper layer for the white border on her photo spots, and that’ll work perfectly for what I have in mind. I’m going to put my two longest landscape photos into that big photo spot!

And I can use that paper circle to hide a multitude of sins… Once I fit the photos into the spot edge-to-edge – I DID NOT Clip the photos to the spot – I created a gap between the bottom of one and the top of the other. I made sure the gray photo spot layer was the active layer. Then I used the Marquee Tool to outline that gap.

Then I Edit>Cut [CTRL/CMD>X] the gray bit out of that gap. The white paper creating the border around the spot remains untouched.

In this screenshot you can easily see the white strip! Another feature of Connie‘s templates is that she doesn’t pre-shadow, so I can decide how I want those two photos to look in the finished layout. I just moved some of the layers at the bottom up a bit to help hide the ugly fake snow bit. The smaller photo spots needed minor adjustments too, the left one tilted into landscape orientation and the right one downsized into a more square shape.

I know some of you will have other methods of increasing your photo ops with templates. Please share them in the comments. I read them all, even if I don’t reply to them. I’d like to thank Sherry for her recommendation for PeaZip when I bemoaned the number of folders I had to unzip. I tried it out and it’s great! Just like this little community we’ve created here…

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, GingerBread Ladies, Tutorials Tagged With:

Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

January 27, 2026 by 1 Comment

Quick Trick: Curses… That Cursor!

Today’s Quick Trick is a touch self-serving, but I can’t be the only one who has old eyes… My mom turned 90 on Sunday and I wanted to surprise her with my favourite black-and-white photo of her, taken in 1963. But it was COVERED in dust specks, and I couldn’t leave it like that! So I opened it up in PSE to fix it. Well. The Spot Healing Brush cursor has become completely invisible to my rapidly declining eyes when the background is any shade of gray and I soon had a headache from trying to see it. There’s a little trick that can help locate it – using the space bar to change the cursor momentarily to the Hand Tool – but it’s very momentary, and if you try to move it, POOF! I needed a better solution, so I did a web search. The results weren’t encouraging… there’s no way to change the colour of the cursor, which would have been perfect. So I tried some of the suggestions people offered. Changing the “pointer” settings in Windows didn’t do anything useful, but I did find something that worked, sort of. I’ll show you what I settled on.

Oy, these screenshots don’t show well here. So I’ll narrate. I clicked Edit>Preferences>Display & Cursors… to access the cursor settings.

These were the settings I was working with for the Painting Cursor, which is what Elements classifies both the Spot Healing Brush and the Clone Stamp. These settings were Normal Brush Tip and Show Crosshair in Brush Tip. That setting appears as a circle with crosshairs inside it. It shows up well on white – it turns black and pops nicely – and black, because it’s white. But any shade of gray and it’s totally invisible to me.

I tested some other options and didn’t like the ones that use an eye-dropper icon. When I switched to Precise and left the Crosshair box ticked. the cursor changed from that faint circle with the crosshairs to just a plus sign, but it was infinitely more visible even against most shades of gray. The one drawback is that the SIZE of the Brush Tip isn’t obvious with this setting. The Shield will appear when you click the Brush over a spot, and you’ll have an idea of size that way. I can live with that.

I will be writing a Lasso-vs-Magic Wand Selection post for you, but I’ve discovered I’ll need more time to prepare it than I expected. Since my husband’s eye surgery I’ve been doing all of our son’s care and transfers in addition to all of my own usual tasks, so I haven’t had a ton of spare time. He has another follow-up with the ophthalmologist on Thursday and hopefully will be cleared to get back to normal. Watch this space!

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Digital Scrapbooking, Tutorials Tagged With:

Tutorial Wednesday (Individual Style)

January 21, 2026 by 2 Comments

Challenge Spotlight: Mini Kit

Wow, you GingerScrappers have been busy this month! As of 1:20 pm PST, there have been 654 individual layouts uploaded to the 2026 Challenge Galleries. That’s phenomenal… and I think I should track the totals for the year to see just how prolific we are.

I’ve spoken before about what makes a Challenge ideal for an Individual Style Blog post, but I’ll go over it again. Of course, the participants for every Challenge are given identical criteria for each Challenge. Some Challenges can be met in a really wide variety of ways, while others are more narrowly defined. For example the Color Challenge provides participants with 2, 3 or 4 colors that must be used for their layouts. But there are a multitude of kits in the Shop that will fit the criteria. So narrow, but not. On the other hand, the Use It All Challenge provides a mini kit with maybe 10-12 items in it, all of which must be visible on the layouts. Narrow! These narrower Challenges are best suited for an Individual Style analysis. How does the Scrapper USE IT ALL? Can the viewer identify that Scrapper‘s style? What sets them apart? So with that in mind. this month the Challenge I selected is the Mini Kit, hosted by Lisa Rosa Designs. This is the kit: 5 papers, 3 flowers, some foliage, a film strip and 4 word art bits. It coordinates with Lisa‘s Between Then & Next collection, and participants are welcome to use it to enhance their layouts. Let’s look at how it’s been used.

Before I get rolling, I’m going to add some of my periodic reminders about the Challenge Spotlight posts, which may also apply to other posts too. Every layout I post here will be linked to the Gallery so that you can get a closer look, and maybe leave a comment. The link will be attached to the Scrapper’s user name. It will be in coloured, bold, underlined text. Any time you see some coloured, bold, underlined texts in any of my posts, you can safely assume they’re hyperlinks in disguise. Try it out! One other thing about this series of posts is that when I choose a Challenge to examine, I may not be able to post EVERY layout that has been completed for the month, due to the sheer volume of them! (That’s a good thing!!!) To be completely fair in that situation I’ll select all the odd- or even- numbered layouts, or I’ll use a Random.Org randomizer. That way, it’s not me personally choosing which layouts to post, and I’ll always explain how the layouts were arrived at. This month, I selected the odd-numbered layouts.

Layout #1 belongs to nimble4u. She has used all but the word art bits for her layout. She extended the filmstrip to accommodate the photos she wanted to include.

For her layout, photocrazy used all but the mustard patterned paper – which I feel was the right call – and split the filmstrip into two pieces. Using them as background elements rather than to frame smaller photos allows her sunset photo to stand out. Note how the colours in the sky are picked up by the papers, almost as an extension of her photo. Her choice of word art bits is spot-on. Well done!

Here, dhariana chose not to use the large ivory-backed floral paper and used clipping shapes for her paper accents. She chose a spare, white-space style for her version, and added some stitching as an anchor for her cluster. The simple word art title completes the layout.

SandraJ has used the entire mini kit here. The floral background paper draws the eye in, the single photo stretched the entire width of the film strip and the creative use of the word art bits keep the eye moving.

Nice ‘do, beccasue! She’s used the film strip as a clipping mask for the blue-gray paper, tucking a greatly reduced-size scrap of the striped paper in behind her floral cluster. She has also recoloured some of her flowers. The soft pink background and word art title suggest she really feels transformed.

We have our first adding-to-the-mini layout from justpennys. She’s used items from the mini, such as the flowers and foliage, she’s clipped papers to the tags, blended the mustard coloured mini kit paper with one from the collection and used some of the word art from both to form her title and subtitle. Then she’s added a plethora of elements and papers from the full collection. Nice!

The ivory floral background makes a reappearance with trinanne. It’s the only paper she used, other than a sliver of the pink for a journaling block. She kept the focus on the film strip of smiling faces.

Glori2 chose to document growth in a little person learning new skills. That narrow strip of striped paper divides the layout neatly across the middle, with paired film strips providing the proof. There’s not a shred of pink to be seen. 😉

Are you laughing our loud right now? I LOVE the humour in makeyesup‘s layout. It’s true – dogs have masters, cats have staff. 🙂 I like the narrow yellow paper borders overlying the striped paper in the background and the blue-gray paper in the foreground.

For her layout, kabrak1207 has used almost everything from the mini and added some bits from the Between Then & Next. It’s interesting that the way she’s arranged the papers in her stack makes that blue-gray paper look more green. The spray of elements along the edge of her photo adds the perfect touch to bring all the attention to the little girl’s eyes.

I hope I haven’t made any glaring typos! I never realized how much I use my left ring finger before. The splint is doing the job and I might be able to leave it off in a day or so. And I really should analyze how I injured it so I can prevent a recurrence. Anyway, how would you all like me to learn the difference between the Lasso Tool and the Magic Wand Tool and share it with you?

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Challenge Spotlight, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Digital Scrapbooking Freebies, GingerBread Ladies, Tutorials Tagged With:

Tutorial Tuesday (Potpourri)

January 13, 2026 by 5 Comments

Greatest Hits: Decluttering Isn’t Just for Homes

It’s January. It’s bone-chillingly cold in some parts of the world (although oddly enough, we’re having a very mild winter) and unseasonably warm in others. The holidays are over, and winter stretches out in front of us like a long and bumpy road. There’re no truly exciting events on the horizon, so what’s a girl to do? Well, the flyers are filled with supplies for organizing our stuff… But for Digi-Scrappers, we don’t need to buy anything. It’s all right in front of us! I think now is a good time to talk about organizing our stuff, and maybe actually making some effort to get ‘er done. This is how I do it, but I know y’all have your own way of doing things, The important part is to DO it!

It’s not as important where we start as that we actually DO start. For me, the place to begin will be with all the new kits I’ve amassed but haven’t unzipped. This is actually my New Year’s Resolution, to unzip and relocate my supplies as soon as I download them. I was keeping up just fine for awhile, don’t even ask me how it fell apart this time. I have a backlog, and I WILL attend to it. Eventually. I was using an unzip app but when I moved to my current laptop, I found the newest version to be.. unhelpful. So I went back to the labour-intensive single-folder method. It’s a tiny bit easier with Windows 11, but still laborious. I find it’s less work to create a new folder for those kits with multiple downloads, so they are all in one place when it’s time to ditch the stuff I’m never going to use. Then I don’t have to go back and search all the download folders to find the ones I’ve unzipped. I go through each of the subfolders, deleting all the duplicate previews and things I know I’m not going to use (like alpha sheets!). If the kit is templates, I delete the PNG files and the TIFF files, and I add to the name of the previews to include single or double and the number of photo spots the template includes. That lets me put a keyword like “single4” in the search bar and Windows will find all the previews with 4 photo spots. Once I’ve arranged my folders the way I like them, I move them en bloc to my digikit folder for the store or designer as appropriate. Then my download folder should be empty. Until I fill it up again!

The way I sort my digikits is primarily by store or by designer’s creative team, My GingerScraps folder is ENORMOUS!  With Tinci Designs‘ retirement, I’ll be moving all her folders to a peripheral drive and my main GS folder will be much thinner. 🙁 I rename each kit’s folder: DesignerNameKitName, unless it’s a Buffet kit, then it’s MonthYearBufDesignerNameKitName. That makes it easier when I’m doing a store challenge.

I try to organize my photos as I take them, so the job isn’t too daunting. I don’t care for the Organizer that comes with Photoshop Elements so I don’t use it. But it can be very useful for both organizing and retrieving your photos. The Help menu can give you some ideas about how to maximize your efficiency. The way I file my photos is in folders… what else? I create a new folder for the current year, and a subfolder for each month. (I used to religiously rename my photos for easier retrieval, but have gotten lazy lately. Sigh. Another task on the To Do List.) Photos go into the folder for the month and year they were taken so I have some frame of reference later. I have a folder for the photos my friend Sandy takes and graciously allows me to ‘steal’ and one for the photos I download from Pixabay. My Pixabay folder is broken down into subfolders by topic: Kids, Insects/Flowers, Animals, Portraits, Scenic and such. This method of filing makes it a lot faster to find what I’m looking for.

I also organize my layouts. I have folders for each month’s challenges, with subfolders for the challenges themselves. When the year is over, they all collectively are filed in a folder for the whole year. Then again, I have some folders that have copies of the finished layouts for my daughters’ weddings, my grandkids’ first years, all of my Ireland layouts and for the creative teams I’m on. It’s all about finding things later!

I (once again) haven’t taken the time to go through my 1400+ fonts and retag them for MainType. I lost a bunch of fonts when I set up this laptop, and have had to either track them down and download again, or just let them go. I really do need to get on with it! It’s a daunting task, but you know what they say. Focus on the first step. I know the time I spend on it now will decrease the time it takes me to find the one font I’m looking for later. The best part of MainType is that I decide what my tags are, based on MY workflow – how I search for things. And like everything else, if I work at it as I add new fonts, the amount of time I spend on it will go way down. My husband had eye surgery yesterday and we’re still working out how to navigate his limitations; I don’t know if I’ll have free time to actually start anything, never mind anything that requires focus and concentration. But just writing about it is giving me a rash, so let’s move on!

One caveat. If you’re going to delete duplicate files, make sure you only delete the ones you’re not going to want to search for later. I made the mistake of using a Windows utility and chose the wrong metric so it removed a LOT of my original templates and left me with the PSD files for the last layout I used them for. Retrieving the original template takes a lot of time but is necessary when I use the search feature to find previews for my desired number of photos. Oh, and maybe now’s a good time to BACK UP all your stuff.

I’m interested to hear how YOU organize your stuff. So please, share your secrets!

 

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Tutorials Tagged With:

Tutorial Tuesday (Photoshop Elements)

December 30, 2025 by 1 Comment

Quick Trick: Instant Clusters

While I was working on a layout the other night, it occurred to me that I had the perfect topic for a Quick Trick, something that I just do automatically, that really streamlines my scrapping. Let’s be honest… we’re all busy. So we can all use some shortcuts, right? Now, those of you who are more experienced with digital scrapping might already have this trick in your arsenal, so this is more for the still-getting-comfortable-with-the-process people. You’ll see!

Did you know that you can Duplicate entire clusters with only a couple of clicks? It’s true! Rather than Copying each item in a cluster individually, you can do the whole shebang all at once! Start by finding the various components of your cluster in the Layers Panel. Select each by clicking CTRL/CMD>click until all of them are showing as active in the Layers Panel. If all the things are in a single pile rather than spread out through the stack, you can instead use Shift>click on the first item and then Shift>click on the last item in the cluster to Select all of them in fewer steps. In my sample below. I’m only Duplicating the two leaf elements, which are stacked together.

Once you have the whole cluster Selected, click CTRL/CMD>J and ALL the items will be duped, dropped right on top of the original *cluster*! If you leave the dupes Selected/active, you can move the entire pile up or down the Layers Panel, then relocate them to the appropriate spot on the layout. Those of you who use a lot of Tinci Designs‘ templates will see the usefulness of this! Krisztina often creates her template clusters from five or six elements, which she Duplicates in two or three other locations around the layout, with some items in slightly different orientations. This makes it so quick! The keyboard shortcut for moving layers up is CTRL/CMD>[ and the one for moving them down (handy if you overshoot!) is CTRL/CMD>].

My leaf elements started out at the top centre of the layout, pointing up and slightly left, and ended up at the bottom centre-left, pointing slightly down and to the right. If you’ve got several objects in your cluster and would like to shift them around so they don’t look too matchy-matchy, but still giving you a cohesive layout, go for it!

Can you believe this is the LAST Tuesday of 2025? The next time we’re together will be for a Designer Spotlight. It’s somebody we all know and love; will there be some surprises? Maybe……. Happy New Year, everybody!

 

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Tutorials Tagged With:

Tutorial Tuesday (Greatest Hits)

December 23, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Ghosts of Christmases Past

The photographic kind, I mean! I meant to revisit this retro post about preparing for holiday photos earlier, but life got in the way. There are still some holidays yet to arrive, so better late than never. For most of us, photos are the focus of our scrapbooking efforts and anything that can help capture great photos is worth a second or third look. I know we’re all super busy right now, but maybe find a few minutes to gear up.

  1. Find your camera’s battery charger NOW and make sure you use it! If your camera uses disposable batteries, stock up NOW. I keep a basket filled with several sizes of battery so I have them handy when I need them. (Like Sunday at 5 am when the battery in the smoke detector in my bedroom announced it was quitting and moving to Arizona. Fun times!)
  2. Check that you have a fresh SD card in your camera and that it has a decent amount of memory available. If you’re into phonetography, you might want to trim your in-phone collection by saving them to your computer or the Cloud, then deleting them from your internal storage. I have a handy little PhotoStick where I’ve backed up my phone’s gallery. If you’re an Amazon Prime member, you also have unlimited Cloud storage as part of your membership perks.
  3. Think about how your typical holiday events usually evolve. There will be some traditions that are carried out no matter whose house you’re having the celebrations at, so plan ahead to capture those moments. Make a list, if you need to. I’d need to! See below for a great list of prompts that I borrowed from Traci Reed.
  4. If you haven’t done it lately, review the manual that came with your camera. Review the settings and modes you’re most likely to use for your shots and remind yourself what each is doing while you’re shooting. I use the metadata from my most successful bokeh and full moon shots to set my camera up ahead of time so I don’t miss the shot.
  5. Refamiliarize yourself with your tripod, if you use one. I have three – an aluminum ball-head one that allows infinite adjustments but takes a lot of room and needs to be set up ahead of time, a mini that’s only for my phone and a Platypod Max, which looks like a little travel iron but is actually a very clever and sturdy tripod that can be set up in minutes on any surface. Why use a tripod? It lets you take longer exposures while keeping the images tack-sharp and it lets you be in the photo! Use the built-in timer and get in FRONT of the lens for a change. You’ll like the results much better than those you get with a selfie-stick.
  6. Practice a few creative techniques that you can memorize so that when you’re ready to take photos of the candles on your dinner table or that gloriously brown turkey, you won’t have to fumble. Practice, practice, practice! The best thing about digital photography is that we don’t have to keep the duds! (Too late for this year, but good to have for next year.)
  7. Do you go all out with a gorgeous table-scape for your guests? I’ve never done it, but I love seeing what others do. (Okay, so I HAVE done a couple of table-scapes in the home decorating game app on my phone. But not a REAL one.) If you’re hosting and have your table all set well in advance (like the experts recommend for sanity’s sake ) take a few minutes to look at it with your photographer’s eye. Take a shot of a single place setting. Try and get the whole table in a shot, easiest if you shoot from one end. Take a closeup of your crystal. (I’m hoping that next year, we’ll have all three of our kids, the two sons-in-law, and our three grandkids all around the table for the first time. Crossing my fingers!)
  8. Don’t forget to get some shots of the dinner prep. Be stealthy and get some candids of the main cook, or if that’s you, get some of your helpers. Look for interesting camera angles of your turkey, ham or standing rib roast. Ask someone to be the carver and get some action shots. And look for smiling faces as the meal commences. When taking photos of food, get in close and vary the angles. Show the flaky texture of that piecrust, the glisten of the done-to-perfection skin on your turkey, the creaminess of your mashed potatoes, the detail of the frosting on your cupcakes.
  9. Composition is key for any photo. Remember the rule of thirds, but don’t be a slave to it. Decide what your focal point will be and compose your photo to make it so – use leading lines where possible and don’t forget white space. Crop your photos in the viewfinder – so much less work later! And don’t forget the background. Is there anything growing out of someone’s head? Take a step to one side or the other and recompose. Think of the Vanity Fair photos the whole world was talking about. And don’t do any of that! (Unless you’re going for brutal realism. Then Christopher Anderson can be your muse.)
  10. Get in close to your subject! Even more so when that subject is a child. Get down on their level whenever possible so you capture their best smiles. Shooting from above should be reserved for those special-effect shots, not photos of kids having fun. For the most natural photos of people though, you can use a telephoto lens and shoot them from some distance. (As long as the light is right!)
  11. Don’t insist on smiles. You know what I mean… those cheesy grins aren’t going to be your favourite images. Rather than having everybody say “cheese” for your group shots, have them say “family” or “money” or “gotcha”. You could go with a made-up phrase, such as “moldy mozzarella”. Another trick is to tell everyone you’re going to shoot on “3”, then count, “1… 2… (shoot) WHOOPS 3!” then shoot a second shot right after that. You’ll get some natural smiles that way.
  12. We’ve all got a folder full of group photos where everybody is stiffly lined up and fake-smiling at the camera. So how can we take better group shots? Having the subjects doing something together is a good start. If you have snow in your area, have the group build a snowman, or have a snowball fight. Or play football in the snow. Beach ball volleyball (in sand or snow) would make some entertaining shots. But if you just have to have a posed group shot, give some thought to who goes where. If you can arrange the people so that their faces form little triangles, you’ll have a nicer image. Have them turn their shoulders toward each other or the centre of the photo so they can get a bit closer together. Make sure you’ve chosen a landscape setting so everybody will be in focus. Think about trying not to cut people’s legs off. If you can, shoot everybody down front from the waist up. Your subjects will thank you.
  13. (Missed it by that much!) If you’re celebrating Chanukah, there are lots of great ways to take photos of your menorrah. A series, with each night’s new candle lighting, would make a lovely layout. Look at the angles. On the last night, when all the candles are burning, an angled shot from one end with each flame visible would be incredible. Some of my favourite photos of my grandsons are of them lighting a candle, with the soft glow of the flame on their cheeks and wonder in their eyes. (Their mom takes amazing photos.)
  14. When shooting your tree, look for a different approach than the typical 8-feet-away-so-the-whole-tree-and-gifts-are-in-the-shot. Maybe take some close-ups of your favourite ornaments. Use a portrait mode to soften the background and make the ornament totally the focal point. Get down on the floor and shoot up toward the topper, or shoot down through the branches and make the presents the subject. Turn off all the room lights and shoot the tree with just the tree lights. Experiment with shutter speed and aperture to create some lovely bokeh effects. Add a human or a pet to the frame. Or take a photo of the lights reflected in a window. (If you don’t want your reflection in your photo, stand at an angle to the window and look carefully at what’s in the viewfinder.) Or take a photo of the tree THROUGH the window! Turn off your flash though, so you don’t spoil the shot.
  15. What about gifts? Well, there’re lots of opportunities around gift opening. Get down on the floor with the kids. Try to capture the moment when they identify what’s in the package. If it’s your thing, you can take some of them channeling Vanna White, holding up a favourite gift. If there’s a very special gift being given, arrange for it to be delivered when you have a moment to frame your image. I really wish I had a photo of myself when I opened a gift from my sister quite a few years ago. It was a resin frame with dragonflies on it, but what made it truly special was that it held a photo of me with my grandfather, who died when I wasn’t yet 4 years old. If you know in advance, you can be ready to catch the emotion.
  16. After the dust settles, you can relax, but don’t forget there might still be some great photos yet to happen. Like when a child falls asleep in the middle of a game, or the dog takes off with a long piece of ribbon… they could be the best shots you get all day. But don’t concentrate so hard on getting good photos that you don’t have fun! At a family reunion, my niece made a point of taking a selfie with every single one of us, and they were all fantastic. If you have mad selfie skills, give it a whirl. You might surprise yourself!

Now for the list of prompts I promised! As I said, this came from Traci Reed via Facebook. It’s a bit less crisp than I’d like, but it’s still readable, I hope. Some of them are already here in the text, but definitely not all.

I would be remiss if I ignored those for whom the holidays are NOT the thing of loving memories and happiness. If that’s you, think about what DOES give you joy and take photos of that. Many of the above tips apply equally to photos of more ordinary events; sometimes getting out of our own heads and letting distraction help with that can be really therapeutic. One of my closest friends lost her dad last week and she’s really not feeling the holiday thing at all. Remember, if it’s something you feel, it’s perfectly okay to document it, even if it’s painful. Reality bites a lot of us, and the holidays can be really awful. Just know that I see you.

Next Tuesday, I’ll try to have a Quick Trick for you so I don’t create more chaos in between the Big Days. Take care, love you all!

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Lets Celebrate, Tutorials Tagged With:

Tutorial Tuesday (Individual Style)

December 16, 2025 by Leave a Comment

Challenge Spotlight: Bucket List

This week has already started feeling like it’s a month long. I have so much left to do, and disaster is lurking around every corner. But as long as that finger I sprained back in March doesn’t pitch a fit (as it has been for the last few days), you’ll all have a Blog Tutorial to check out while I brave the crowds at Costco. 😉

For this month’s Challenge Spotlight, I chose the Bucket List Challenge, hosted by Scraps-N-Pieces. The prompt: This month we’d like you to read a new book, scrap your favorite book/author, scrap your reading list from this last year. Now, I’m sure you’re wondering how I can shoehorn this Challenge into a box labeled Individual Style. It’s really not that big of a stretch. Creativity begins in the brain, where we process information and formulate ideas. Each of us will take a prompt like this one and approach it from our own perspective. And in doing so, we give others a glimpse into our innermost thoughts. You’ll see!

There are six layouts for this Challenge (so far) and they’re all quite different. I’ve linked each to their spots in the Challenge Gallery so you can see them in greater detail, and perhaps leave a comment or two. Just click on the Scrapper’s name. Here we go!

Grace. has taken the prompt quite literally (pun intended!) by writing a book review. I think her approach is very clever. It took me a bit of time to really see all the thought she put into the layout, even though she had a checklist to follow. The book choice tells me she enjoys suspense, but her review doesn’t really say much about whether the story lived up to her expectations. The *no stars given* implies she didn’t love it, but maybe she just missed that part. She reads on an e-reader, and has a busy life. Oh, and her scrapping style appears to be “clean and simple”, but only if I base my evaluation on this one layout. 😀

Of course, Katherine Woodin is an open book. (Yep, it’s gonna be one of THOSE posts!) To anyone who spends any time in the Gallery or the Forum, Katherine’s daily diary gives glimpses into her life. Her journaling is legendary! She was widowed fairly recently and her Bucket List layout tells me she’s learning how to grow around her loss. <3

If one reads between the lines of KatL‘s layout, you might pick up on the fact she works in a library. It’s not front-and-centre in her journaling, but the clues are all there. She truly CANNOT live without books! 😉 As for her scrapping style, she loves the layered look, with lots of papers and just a bit of grunge.

What vibes are you picking up from MemmieNelleke? It’s obvious she’s Dutch just from her name, and the books in her photos support that conclusion. She reads books in series, has several favoured authors, likes historical fiction and has a special interest in the Holocaust. She likes bright colours and has a love for children.

BriannasScrapper is very serious about her books. She doesn’t just read them, she logs them at Goodreads, she scores them and she basically devours them! There’s a little bit of everything here, from fantasy to suspense to feminist literature and romance. (I thought I was doing really well, having read 75 books this year. I need to pull up my socks!) IT’s impossible to get a bead on her scrapping style from just this one layout, though I would expect her other layouts to be highly organized. 😉

Our last participant is Yvonne55. She’s also reading in Dutch, enjoys reading in series and likes thrillers. (I want to see if I can find an English version of Het Bloemen Meisje; the story sounds really engaging. No, I don’t read Dutch, but Google Translate does.) Her scrapping style is classic, and she likes bright colours.

With Hannukah already underway, only 9 more days until Christmas, then Kwanzaa and New Year closing out 2025, I know we’re all crazy busy. And it shows in the Challenge Galleries. I hope you can all find a few minutes to just breathe. If you’re in the Pacific Northwest and you’re on evacuation from the flooding, or digging yourself out in the snowbelt, please be safe. If you’re travelling in the coming weeks, you be safe too!

 

Filed Under: Be Inspired, Behind the Scrapbook, Book Lover, Challenge Spotlight, Creative Style, Digital Scrapbooking, Tutorials Tagged With:
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