Life’s Lessons

Today is supposed to be Mamang’s 62nd birthday. She may not be celebrating this day with us now, I know she is having a grand time in heaven with the angels.

Journaling: Five years has passed since I cannot greet you personally on your birthday. It has been that long but you are always in my thoughts every single day that God has made. No amount of words could describe how I miss you – your very comforting voice, the tender loving care, and the unconditional love of a mother. It has never been easy for me without you. I may be secretive about my personal concerns then but the thought of you being behind me all the way is enough to comfort me. Now it’s totally different. I may not be able to talk to you but I know you are watching over me – over us. I can’t thank you enough for being such the best mother in the whole world – for taking care of us – your family – while doing your day job as a public school teacher. I love you and I miss you!

Happy Birthday Mamang!!!

The first time I saw a digital scrapbook layout by a blogger friend, I was drooling and I wanted to scrap at that instant. But then I don’t know where to start so I asked that friend how to start digital scrapbooking. She was helpful enough and told me there are tutorials in youtube for beginners. Since I have CS3, and I wanted to scrap badly, I turned to youtube and look for a tutorial for beginners. Luckily, I found one video tutorial that is so easy to understand.

As I am getting the hang of it, I am learning new things each time that I scrap. For beginners like me, here are 5 Digital Scrapbooking tips to make a layout:

1) Learn the basic in youtube. If you are not yet familiar with how layers work in Photoshop, look for a tutorial in youtube about working with layers. Since it is the basic of digital scrapbooking, everything will be easier once you get the hang of it.

2) Check for freebies. Before I learned digital scrapbooking, I was already downloading freebies from different sites. There are lots of designers, stores, or even personal sites offering free digital scrapbooking materials from kits, quickpages, templates, to frames, and other materials.

3) Scrap with the right motivation. I was always intimidated with seasoned digiscrappers’ pages/layouts. If I compare my digital scrapbook layouts with their work, mine is definitely inferior with theirs. But as some friends told me, I need to put in mind that I am scrapping for me, my family and friends…and not for others. Hence, whatever my page/layout would look like, as long as I am keeping the memories through scraps, then I am good to go. Digital scrapbooking is keeping/recording memories, not a contest.

4) Exert effort in journaling. This is my weakness. I am not into journaling so most of my layouts lack journaling. But then I am trying to incorporate journaling into my pages now. I realized there are instances when photos are not enough to tell a story, so journaling is definitely the best thing to do to complete the memory-keeping process.

5.) Use templates. Beginners and even the seasoned digiscrappers use templates to make their work a lot easier. I tell you, it really is! When I started working on my photobook, I worked from scratch for the first few pages. Until a friend suggested to use templates. It did work! You can use the same template a lot of times, just change the paper and add other elements.

I hope those 5 tips and tricks could help budding scrappers in one way or another. Happy digiscrapping!

I am participating in a blogger campaign by Bucks2Blog and was compensated. However, the views and opinions are my own

P. S.

If you really enjoy this hobby, consider a career in design. Start your graphic design portfolio by checking out graphic design college.

Photobook is one of my pending projects for the longest time. I realized I need such because I have tons of photos and printing it would cost me a lot not to mention the need to buy a high quality album.

After pushing this project aside for years, I finally broke a leg and started making digiscrap layout for the pages. I am not an expert in digiscrapping so this is a big challenge for me. But as I finish one page at a time, I felt happy and fulfilled..as I am learning new things everyday while putting all the photos together in one page.

Credits: Papers and embellishments from Fun in the Sun kit by LorieM designs

Simple layouts but it took me so much time putting things together. How I wish I have extra moolah to buy templates now so that making photobook will be a lot easier. More pages next time!