Portland Scrapbooking

Thanksgiving break is nearly over and the long winter break looms in the cold Portland fog. Here’s some ideas on scrapping those pictures your kids bring home to you.

1. Photo or Scan them, print them in a smaller size and scrapbook the copies.
2. Scan them and use them for cards printed at snapfish or another print shop. ( better get this one done soon!)
3. take a picture of the child holding the item and then take the art/item and date the back and save it.
4. scan things and use them as doodles, backgrounds, etc.
5. Putting them in a separate scrapbook for each child insures that they will be able to take everything with them and later show them to their own children

What do you do to scrap your kids’ artwork?

After ten years, the Art House on Broadway has closed its doors. I always thought it was the best in portland- it was diverse and lively, and the shelves were well organized. But it’s time for it to go.

Clean out your closets!

SALE starts friday at 10am!

You package your own items, put your name on each item, and a price. They sell your items under your name and you receive a credit to spend in the store! Each person who places items for sale in the Garage Sale will have to agree to volunteer for 1 hour or pay a $10 fee. It’s that easy. You may bring stuff to sell all the way through the 20th!

If you would like a copy of the Garage Sale Contract, please send an email to info@scrapbookattack.com or stop by and pick one up at the store.

This weekend’s garage sale is a treasure hunters dream; they already have some great items coming in!

I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I don’t really know that much about glue. I’ve worked with regular glue, glue dots, and photo corners, as well as a few other options. Here’s what I’ve learned. Primarily, these items are used for sticking paper to paper in your scrapbooking.

Glue

When you’re scrapbooking, “regular glue” comes in sticks; glue sticks. They’re just like the ones you buy for your kids to take to school, although acid-free and pH neutral. You take the cap off, you smear the glue on the back of whatever you’re sticking to something else, you press the two sheets of paper together and one thing leads to another, you’re done. Glue sticks, generally, are permanent adhesive; you can’t easily pull the items apart and reposition them. You can frequently wrinkle your project when you’re sticking it together with glue sticks, and over time the glue may lose its adhesive qualities, so your project falls apart.

Glue Dots

I’ve used two kinds of glue dots- one comes on a roll, and is a flat two sided sheet of adhesive. The other comes on a sheet and has some height to it. You use them both in the same way, remove the dot from the roll or sheet (some rolls have a dispenser, making this easy), and place in a convenient location on your project, then put the other thing to be glued on top. Some dots are permanent, some are designed to be “repositionable.” Make sure you read the package when you purchase them and match the item to your needs. They’re generally neater than glue sticks and the thicker ones provide a nice visual dimension to your project.

Photo Corners

Photo corners make a classic way to hold your photos to the page, or other items you might want to be able to pick up and turn over, like a postcard. They don’t stick directly to the photo and so the photo itself is repositionable but the corners generally are permanent. They’re great for heirloom photos that can’t be replaced, but since the glue isn’t touching the photo itself, some people complain that the photos can leap out of the corners. And the corners can be tricky to place correctly.

I’ve used these three different kinds of adhesive, and I think that the dots are my favorite. Make sure not to use too much, they’re expensive.

The summer feels almost over; the stores are starting to carry school supplies. I’m excited, and sad. August is the last month of true “summer” for me; and soon we’ll be inside again, scrapping our memories of the fun things we’ve done this summer.

BasicGrey has a brand new lineup to help you with that. This batch is called “Recess” and like all the new papers and embellishments, is inspired by the “vintage look” and still tries to evoke a feeling of fun.

You can get your BasicGrey packs at any of your Local Stores!

For Sale: Vintage Scrapbook — 1941 — baby’s birth and first year. Baby’s name is Billy Arlen Mack from Defiance and Cecil, Ohio. The date of birth is February, 1941.

I didn’t even realize that you could buy antique baby scrapbooks on Ebay. However, Bill Mack has learned this lesson in a remarkable way.

In January, Bill’s cousin sent him an email with the above advertisement. By mid March he had reclaimed his baby book, thanks to the winner of the auction; Kathy Most, of New York. Kathy didn’t even want to be reimbursed for her $13 dollars she spent on the book; she was just happy to be part of the story.

Get the details here.

For the most part, this list of most common photograph mistakes can be applied to the everyday photos we shoot of our lives. I’ve repeated the list below, but for more detail you really should view his list; he has photo examples ( which I’ve purposefully left out ) and paragraphs of explanation. (I omitted the two about people and keeping them in the shot or not).

1. Image is Cluttered
2. ‘No such thing as bad weather’
   I’ve noticed that a lot of scrapbook photos are taken on sunny days. Sunny days are beautiful but the quality of light causes more shadows and more contrast. Try shooting on cloudy days too.
3. No Patience
4. The Digital Attitude
5. The Photoshop Attitude
6. Unwanted things in a scene
   Light posts sticking out from behind someone’s head, for instance, as opposed to ‘clutter.’
7. Always shooting from eye level.
8. Wrong Perspective

Take a look at what he has to say. Make sure to read his disclaimer at the bottom. Even some of the comments have good points.

Something I’ve been working on is to add local scrapbooking stores to this list, so that people can find their websites more easily. However, I’ve gotten stalled on the “look up, then add” process and I didn’t want to seem unfair; so I’ve set up a “link directory.”

You can reach it by that url, or by the links over on the right sidebar, under “Local Resources.”

It’s set up because I wanted a list of Portland-Area stores and their websites; I’d be happy with non-reciprocal links. Of course if you have the space, time and inclination, I’d prefer the return link.

Free Stuff!

• Pillow Girl
• it gets better
• scrapgirls
• scrap-a-lot
• selena’s huge list (must see to believe)

The Golden Ratio can be used to enhance your scrapbook pages.

Basically, the golden ratio is the combination of two lengths, such that the length of the two added together divided by the longer or the two is the same as the longer divided by the smaller. This works out to a proportion of 1.618 (it repeats forever, like Pi) and is called “Phi,” using the greek letter to denote it.

Philosophers, and more importantly for us, artists have been fascinated by phi for over 2500 years. Leonardo da Vinci uses phi when he draws the human body and the face. The pyramids of Egypt demonstrate the golden rule. A rectangle that uses this ratio can be the start of a beautiful spiral; if you take away the largest possible square on one side of the rectangle, the rectangle that remains is also of this same ratio; you can continue taking the squares away until you run out of rectangle.

The golden rectangle gives us a means to measure a pleasing asymmetry, such as that used by these interior designers.

But what does this mean for you? Encouragingly, the two photo shapes we most likely use are 3×5 and 4×6; if we crop them slightly to 3×4.85 and 4×6.4, we’ll be using the golden ratio for those shapes. And in those photos, look at where the most interesting point is. Or use the shape as a background for your page; seven and a half inches from one side of a 12×12 sheet will result in a golden rectangle. Or use it to compare a photo and the journaling block next to it; if the photo is 4.85 inches wide, you could do a journalling square of 3 inches to the side of it and be using the golden rule.

Give it a try You might find yourself in the company of da Vinci.