PLxSU and Project Life Cell Phone Photo Resources

So you want to use all your awesome everyday photos in your Project Life album? Yay! But, if you're anything like me, you probably find yourself reaching for your smart phone more than your Cannon or your Nikon, right? Well, fear not! Let's finally get those photos off your phone and into a beautiful scrapbook!

I get photos from my DSLR camera printed at a local photo and art supply store because I love their print quality. Now, don't get me wrong, I know that my iPhone can certainly take some very good photos! But most of mine are taken in the evenings in not-so-stellar lighting conditions. I also organize my Project Life spreads weekly (see more about how I do PL here) so I'm printing a lot of photos and I want to keep my costs down. So I use photo printing apps right on my phone - They're quick and easy and inexpensive!

PostalPix

The app that I use for most of my photos is called PostalPix. It's another free app that lets you upload photos straight from your phone. Then they mail your prints right to your door! It's not stellar quality, but it's certainly not bad, and it suits my purposes just fine. They offer several print sizes - I use them for my 4x6 and 4x4 prints. I think the 4x4's will be fun to play with since the Stampin' Up! Project Life page protectors are the first to have 4x4 pockets! 

Prints will run you about 20¢ to 30¢. Shipping is reasonable, and shipping time is generally quite fast.   You can pay with PayPal or a credit card. The app is very user-friendly and it doesn't take much time at all to get your prints uploaded. 

Kanvess

If you have an Instagram account (it's a cool photo editing app that I, for one, am obsessed with), there's a really great app called Kanvess that pulls photos directly from your Instagram feed. It's the same deal - pay through the app and they send your photos to you. They only have one option: just-under-3" square prints with a white border that are totally adorable. (I love this size when I want to put a photo and a short bit of journaling on a 3x4 card.) Their prints are slightly more expensive, but they send coupons with your orders sometimes and their customer service is top-notch. (They replaced two orders that got lost in the mail free of charge, no questions asked!) The quality of the prints is quite nice too. 

Now let's talk about prepping your photos for printing. The original idea of Project Life was for 4x6 photos with 3x4 journaling cards. The very first page protector design (Design A or, as Stampin' Up! is calling it, Design 1) is four 4x6 photos with spaces in the middle for four 3x4 journaling cards - one card to journal about each of the photos. Project Life has come a long way since it's first days (although I have to say this stalwart is still one of my fave page designs), and it can truly be whatever you want it to be. I've already talked about 4x6, 4x4, and 3x3 photos, but I also like to use 3x4 photos. If you print your photos at home, you can resize them in your editing program and print at whatever size you like. But what if you, like me, don't print your own photos at home? 

To get my 3x4 photos, I put two photos on one 4x6 print. Now hold on, bear with me. It's way easier than it might seem!

Becky Higgins' blog (she's the creator of Project Life) recently featured a great tutorial on how to get two 3x4 photos on one 4x6 print. You can see the whole blog post here: http://bit.ly/1pUhopa That post describes several ways to accomplish 2 photos on one print in many different popular photo editing programs. But since we're talking about phone apps here, let me tell you more about the method I use.

PicFrame

The app is called PicFrame and it's another free app that's available on Android or iPhone. Once you create the 2-in-1 photo, you then save it to your phone and you can print it however you like. (Make sure to read the part of the tutorial about saving with the highest resolution!) I upload my prints to PostalPix, as I described above. Then you just cut the finished print in half. Easy peasy! :) And remember that PicFrame lets you put borders on your photos too, if you like that look. I use this app for 3x4 photos, and also sometimes to put multiple pictures on a square 4x4 print that I also get from PostalPix. 

This method is explained in more detail on Becky Higgins' blog here: http://beckyhiggins.com/wp-content/themes/beckyhiggins/assets/pdf/documents/bh_3x4on4x6_picframetutorial.pdf. 

Anyway, I know that's a lot of info, but my best recommendation is to download the apps and just start playing with them. It took me a while to get onto a system, but I've found that these apps work really really well for me.Give me a holler if you have any questions! And don't forget - you can order Project Life by Stampin' Up! starting TODAY (May 1)!! Check out my video for more information on how I do Project Life, and for a guided tour of the new Project Life by Stampin' Up! line. You can watch it below, or on my YouTube channel.

Happy Scrapbookin'! :)

Echo Park Christmas Collections

Yesterday was a kind of tough day at work. So what better way to brighten a day than with some awesome mail! Sitting waiting for me when I got home: new *Lawn Fawn* stamps, and both of the *Echo Park Paper* Christmas collections! :) You're going to be seeing a lot of the stamps coming up very soon, but for today's post I decided to focus on the Echo Park collections.

No. 1: Merry Christmas

My card:

Supplies: Stamps - Gina K. Designs (Lovely Labels 2), Lawn Fawn (Bows and Holly) a muse art stamps (very merry christmas); Inks - Distress Ink (Peeled Paint, Fired Brick), Colorbox Chalk (Chestnut Roan); Cardstock - Pure Luxury by Gina K. Designs, watercolor paper

My favorite things about this collection:
- metallic silver accents!
- music and text prints
- mix of red and burgundy
- awesome everyday-appropriate prints... houndstooth! argyle! polka dots! distressed solids (à la Basic Grey)! Oh yeah, and the music prints don't have words on them so they're year-round ready too!

No. 2: Everybody Loves Christmas

My card:

Supplies: Stamps - Gina K. Designs (Teatime), Lawn Fawn (Cozy Christmas); Ink - Memento (Tuxedo Black); Cardstock - Neenah; Misc. - Hero Arts Blush Mixed Accents, Copics, Nesties 

(A note about this card... I colored the teacups thinking I'd use the image with Dear Lizzy Christmas items - like this and this and this! - but I just couldn't wait for StopAndScrap.com to ship my order. But the combo of pink/red and chartreuse/pine is perfect with this collection too. A super chic take on Christmas!)

My favorite things about this collection:
- non-traditional color palette - I love pink for Christmas!
- penguins!!! :)
- adorable and oh-so-versatile stickers
- more everyday patterns including polka dots, stripes, swirls, and things that could be snowflakes or could just be a cool medallion-type pattern

The bottom line:
Go out and get these collections. You will be having fun with them all year! :)

Thanks for stopping by!

Penny Black + Get Sketchy + a review

Today I want to share with you my thoughts about a new product that may interest any Copic colorers out there: X-Press It Blending Card. But I wanted to share my cards first in case you don't feel like reading today. :)

I've already shared one card I made with my very first Penny Black stamp set, Jolly Friends. I fell in love with their precious hedgehogs... but I have no idea how to color them! So I started with the mice and the snowman. Here are the other 2 cards I made with this adorable set.

(You can't really see in this photo, but I created an embossed frame by scoring at 1/4" all around the perimeter of the white mat.)

The next card is one I made for the Get Sketchy Challenge #59.

Now, Nichol Magouirk recently mentioned on her blog that she'd found a cardstock specifically designed for Copic coloring, called X-Press It Blending Card. I've been having a lot of issues with my coloring on Neenah Solar White cardstock, so I really wanted to try this new product out. I'd previously used Gina K. Designs Pure Luxury Heavy Baseweight cardstock and really liked how the Copics behaved with it; however, if you colored too many layers it would sort of bead up and not blend properly. I found a 10-pack of the Blending Card on ebay for a good price, and decided to give it a go. My first 3 cards using Penny Black stamps were all colored on it. Let me tell you, if you do any Copic coloring, you must try this product! It is so smooth and just really enjoyable to color on. Nothing bled or smudged or "overflowed the dam" as my Copic guru Jenn said. Nothing, no matter how many layers of shading and blending I added. Not even the dark red. That's a big deal. I did a lot of coloring with my Colorless Blender to get a subtle gradient of color on the mice and to shade the snowman. Eventually, the paper where I was coloring the brown mouse's face did start to tear and pill just a little bit, but I'd already said to myself probably five times that he was done and I should just have left well enough alone. :) So that's just something to be aware of. Another thing I found is that this cardstock smudges and shows little bits of dirt and schmutz really easily. So just make sure your desk and your fingers are clean and be careful if you're doing any ink sponging.

If you're lucky enough to have had a three-day weekend for Columbus Day, I hope you had lots of fun! Thanks for stopping by!

an adhesive comparison

I think I've mentioned before that I've been crafting, cardmaking, and scrapping for years now, but always with supplies from my local stationery stores, found objects (like stickers and my mom's button tin), and, when I lived in Boston, items from my regularly occurring trips to PaperSource (still a favorite, btw!). I'm very new to the "commercial" world of crafting - ie. "collection packs," Crop-a-diles, and rub-on alphabets. In fact, I used to really look down on pre-coordinated patterned papers and whatnot, because all I knew of them were what was available at my local rinky-dink and always poorly stocked A.C. Moore. (Side note: No offense to A.C. Moore! I don't know if it's a corporate thing or just at my local store, but they're completely redoing their paper crafting department, and it promises to be very inspiring! A lot more upscale product!) And now, I almost (almost!) don't know what to do without pre-coordinated collections! :) I blame my obsession on my simultaneous discovery of Two Peas in a Bucket and Kristina Werner's blog last winter - my goodness! Has it only been 4 or 5 months? It may sound silly, but crafting is so important to me that I really feel these two websites really changed my life!

But I digress... Anyway, I've always been pretty much a glue stick and double-stick tape girl. Until recently, that is, when we re-organized our home office and I changed the setup of my craft area. My wonderful husband gave me a set of small totes for Christmas and as I was organizing all my supplies into them, I came across a bright purple 3M tape runner.

I had no idea whatsoever where it had come from, but I figured I had probably spent money on it so I should probably use it up. And I fell instantly in love! Now, I've never seen anybody in the online scrapping community even mention this particular tape runner, which is partly why I wanted to write this blog entry. I used up the random one I found in my stash, searched all over for a refill, finally found them at Amazon, bought three, and used them in about 2 months! Then I was thrilled to find the refills at A.C. Moore too! When I ran out again, A.C. Moore was no longer carrying them - a not-so-awesome side effect of the awesome redo of their paper crafting department. So, I grabbed the only other tape runner I was familiar with: The Tombow Mono.

Now, in full awareness that anyone who might be reading this post has probably never used the 3M tape runner, and has probably already sworn lifelong allegiance to a particular adhesive, I would like to share my opinion of the Tombow tape runner:

a. The Tombow tape runner has very strong adhesive! For me, this is both a pro and a con. The good news is I trust it more to stay stuck and not come apart in the mail, especially in cards I'm selling to strangers. The bad news is it gives you pretty much no wiggle-room! One of my favorite things about the 3M tape runner is that you have a window of several minutes to change your mind or notice your mistake after you've stuck something down. With the Tombow, I'm finding that if I even barely touch the two papers together, they might come apart again but if they do you can bet that one or both will be ripped. This has caused a lot of headaches and wasted materials, but like I said, I'm less worried about my etsy customers' friends and loved ones receiving ruined cards in the mail.

b. Another thing I love about the 3M tape runner is how easy it is to clean up. If you get some where you don't want it, say, by getting too close to the edge and having some adhesive "fold" over to the front of the paper, you can just quickly and easily rub it off with your finger. The Tombow adhesive rubs off, but it's more difficult, sometimes leaves a residue, and can sometimes take some of the top layer of paper off with it. What this has turned into is that I don't run the adhesive as close to the edges of papers as I would like. Mental note: Invest in an adhesive eraser!

c. While I have not had problems with the Tombow "skipping" (the 3M didn't really either), I have noticed that if I don't go slowly and consciously focus on applying even pressure, it's more likely to get those dreaded little "boogers" along one side of the strip of adhesive. The 3M wasn't immune to this problem, but like I mentioned before, the adhesive is much easier to wipe away.

So there you have it. Tombow tape runners were recently "Buy 2 Get 1 Free" at A.C. Moore, so I now have a stash of 5, not including the one I'm currently using. I haven't decided what I'll use when they're gone. I'd like to hear more about the new American Crafts adhesives! :)