P365 Week 21 - 28 Catching up!

I am thinking that whatever small following I did have on my blog have probably given up on me. Heck - I almost gave up on me. Summer has been real busy and I haven't been on the computer very much. We haven't been doing anything big but we have been doing lots of little things. I really wish we were going on a big trip this summer but no-go this year. Clayne has used lots of his vacation going to scout camps, girls camps, youth conferences and family reunions so there really was no time left for us to take a true vacation this year. I do hope that I can plan something for next summer cuz I do love to travel. The Bodily Family Reunion next year will be the Grand Canyon but even that isn't what I am looking for in a vacation so I will be doing some planning to see what I can come up with. We will have lots of credits built up in our condos and so we really should go do something big and fun. We'll see. Anyway... here are 8 weeks of my Project 365 layouts. All of the credits for these pages can be seen in my gallery at Design House Digital. Anyway... I hope you all are enjoying your summer. Just 5 more weeks until school starts - yes... I am counting. Maybe I'll have more time to scrap, blog and even clean when the kids get out of the house.

P365 Week 17-20 & a kit I helped design

I can't believe how hard it is to find a few minutes to blog these days! I am almost caught up on my Project 365 pages with this post. Here are the last 4 weeks that I have done. You can see a list of credits in my gallery at Design House Digital. At the bottom of my post you will see a huge collaboration kit that I had the privlege of helping with. Yes... I designed a portion of the kit. Read more information about the kit below.



Over at the Scrap Orchard they are having a really fun month for June and you can pick up a piece of this kit every day. The important thing is that you will need to visit daily if you want the whole kit because the links will only be available for 24 hours each day. I'll post a pic of just the part I made later this week - just cuz I want to show it off - I think it turned out so cute. So anyway... to read more about this kit & the promotion going on at Scrap Orchard CLICK HERE.

P365 Week 15 and 16 & NSD information

Well, I am pretty much on my way out the door to go to Women's Conference in Provo with some girlfriends. I am excited to get away and I always learn so much at these conferences. I thought I'd just quickly post my two most recent Project 365 pages as well as an advertisment for Design House Digital and Scrap Orchard for the upcoming International Scrapbooking Holiday this Saturday. There will be great events and sales all over the internet in scrapbooking stores. Hope you all enjoy! Oh if you want a list of supplies used on my pages the images are clickable to go to my gallery.


Here is the information for Design House Digital. You can click the image to go to the site.

Here is the list of events for the Scrap Orchard and again you can click the image to go to their site. I know that they plan on having the Farmer's Market open with lots of $1 kits!

P365 Week 13 and 14

We have had a busy few weeks which explains my neglect to my blog. Today I finally had time to do two pages for my Project365. As stated in my last post we were on spring break for a week - which we spent in St. George. It was so warm and relaxing I had a hard time coming home - especially when it had to go and snow like it did with school even being canceled on Tuesday last week. THAT was not NICE! We had a very nice Easter and then spent the week getting ready for Savannah's baptism. It was hard to believe that my baby turned 8. Then to feel even older I celebrated my 40th birthday on Monday this week. I had been dreading the big 4 - 0 for a whole year but now that it has come and gone I don't feel any different.

I scrapped a lot on spring break and have over 20 layouts to share. I hope to do so before the week is over so watch for my pages soon. And if you want a list of credits for the pages above they are clickable to go to my gallery at Design House Digital. Thanks for taking a peak.

P365 Week 11 and 12

Oh goodness time does go by fast. This has been a busy week getting ready for Spring Break and my two girls birthdays. Cheyenne turned 15 on Wednesday and Savannah will be 8 on Sunday. Again I say time does go by fast! Well since I have some packing to finish up before we can go on our family vacation, I will just post my week 11 and 12 of P365. Images are clickable to go to my gallery and see a full list of credits.

St. Pat's Fun & P365 Week 10

I had so much fun with St. Patrick's Day this year. I don't know why I haven't done more with this holiday in the past - It only seems natural for me to celebrate my favorite color GREEN! As I posted last week, I made green shamrock rice crispy treats for my scouts. I decided to try some green popcorn for the ladies I visit teach. Not only was it super cute, but it was yummy too. You can find the recipe HERE at Skip to my Lou. Oh and take care not to burn the green sugar coating.... yes I am speaking from experience... unfortunately I burnt the first batch and had to give it another go.

Walmart had so many cute St. Pat's shirts this year so I splurged and bought each of the kids a fun green shirt to wear. Savannah's says, "This is my Lucky shirt."


A few weeks ago I picked up these cute lime green plates, bowls & cups at the dollar store thinking I would do a green meal for the kids for St. Pat's but then I kind of put it off and had almost decided not to do the meal after all. At about 2 this afternoon I decided that I did want to do it and so hurried to the grocery store and did a little baking and it came together wonderful. I had the table all set when they came home so they'd know that some fun was coming up later. They wanted to heat the gold coins and Hershey nuggets but I assured them I knew how many were on there and that they had better not eat any until after dinner.

I made green cupcakes and LOVED these cute toppers that I found HERE at Busy Bees. The recipe for the cupcakes I am sure I have shared before - the rainbow ones - but for today I only used green food coloring. HERE (from Our Best Bites) is the recipe for that if you want to make a copy. My kids LOVE these cupcakes no mater what color!

Since I didn't have much time I kept the rest pretty simple. I served green guacamole tortilla chips, green spinach fettuccine noodles with alfredo sauce (Newman's brand is actually quite good), green grapes, steamed broccoli, green kool- aid, the cupcakes & decorative chocolates. I'm pretty sure this will become a tradition because it was yummy, easy and the kids loved it!


I meant to post my week 10 page earlier than this but it completely slipped my mind so here it is and you can click on it to go to my gallery and see a credit listing. I decided to photograph some of the green items I have in my house. I can't believe that tomorrow wraps up week 11. I am sure that some of the photos above will be featured in that layout.

P365 Week 9

Just a quick post to update my Project 365. I wish I could find more cute St. Pat's decorations. I was very limited! Maybe it will have to be an ongoing thing and I'll find more each year? I thought these pics of Carson turned out cute - I used them to create my March desktop for my laptop too. If you want a list of credits the image is clickable to go to my gallery at Design House Digital.

P365 Week 7 & some Valentine Photos

Here is my latest page for P365. I enjoyed taking some photos of the kids for Valentine's season. I set up a little home studio by turning my couch to face the big window and draping a sheet over it. I also picked up two Valentine shower curtains (who decorates their bathroom for Valentine's day?) at Target for $5 each the day after Valentine's. One had multi colored hearts (behind Morgan) and the other had large flower graphics in pink (behind Cheyenne) I think it will be fun to use the pink one for Easter shots too. Clayne was an excellent Valentine and came through with a bouquet of roses and dinner at Jaker's. Dinner was soooo good. It was a prime rib and seafood buffet. I ate LOTS of crab legs & didn't feel the least bit guilty for doing so.

Credits: all products By Carina Gardner
AFFECTIONATE-Papers, Design 365 Masks v3, Design 365 A Month of Number Stamps, O CHRISTMAS TREE-Ribbons

So like I was saying I did some photo shoots of the kids. These were some of my favs. Savannah's is taken with natural light but then Carson complained about the sun in his eyes and so I decided to try out Clayne's old flash. He used it with his manual Canon SLR and he has had it from before we married 20 years ago. I wasn't sure it would work with my Nikon D70 but what do you know - It worked and I like the results. I will definitely be playing with it some more. I was thinking I needed to by a speedlight flash but didn't want to ding our budget to purchase one. It is always nice when you find something "free" that works.







That will be all for now... I want to do some scrapping. I hope to share some of my latest pages with you this weekend. Are you enjoying the olympics? I watch them as I scrap on my laptop.

P365 Week 4 and some Layout shares

Here is my Project 365 layout for week 4. I am so excited about how this project is working for me this year. I love assigning a "theme" to my weeks. It is so much easier to scrap the photos when the kind of "go" together. I also wanted to share some layouts I created this week as well as show you the Design House Digital exclusive facebook freebie kit that you can pick up by becoming a fan. Click the image of the super cute kit below to go to the FB page. Below the kit image you can see a page I created using that kit.

(Credits: Design 365: January 31 Day Page Templates By Spencer Nugent, Design 365: January Pack By Spencer Nugent, ESSENTIALS-Stitches v.1 By Carina Gardner, The Day Dreams Collection - Sunset Elements By Meredith Fenwick)


This page I made for the One Kit Four Ways blog post at Design House Digital this week. Using Jen Allyson's Smitten Mini Kit. You can see other layouts using this kit by visiting the blog HERE.

These next two pages are made with new releases at Scrap Orchard this week. New releases are currently on sale so hurry over to pick up the beautiful kits. You can see a list of credits by clicking my layouts below which will take you to my gallery at Scrap Orchard and there you will be able to click on the kit links to go shopping. Thanks for stopping by my blog today and letting me show off my latest creations.

P365 Week 3 and some winter photo tips

(Credits: Design 365: January 31 Day Page Templates By Spencer Nugent, Design 365: January Pack By Spencer Nugent, ESSENTIALS-Stitches v.1 By Carina Gardner, The Day Dreams Collection - Sunset Elements By Meredith Fenwick)

This week my Project 365 photo subject was winter. Shooting photos in the winter can be a tricky thing. I found that the bright snow causes my camera to underexpose my photo. The snow often took on a hue of gray. I will be doing some more study of adjusting my white balance on my camera before I head out to the snow to shoot photos again. Here is just one tutorial I found on this subject:
Understanding White Balance.

These two articles give encouragement to get out and shoot some winter photos. I know I often prefer to do outdoor photography in the other three seasons of the year and tend to stay in the house more in the winter. There are plenty of things to photograph indoors where it is warm but I find that after a little reading and looking around on the net I may just get out and try some new things with my photography this winter.
The Beauty of Winter Photography
Dreaming Winter Photography

Now what about those photos that I was mentioning earlier.... the ones where the snow took on a gray color cast. Well... that is when I am happy to have photoshop. I am still and probably always will be in the learning phase about what this program can do.


The first thing I did was added a Brightness/Contrast adjustment layer. I adjusted my brightness by 30 and set my contrast to 75. When making these adjustments it is a personal preference thing. You have to decide how far to go. If you expose the photo too much you can easily blow out detail. Sometimes I don't mind loosing a little detail if the overall look of the image is improved.
Brightness - How light or dark the picture is.
Contrast - How the brightness is distributed from the lightest to darkest parts of the picture.

Next I added an Exposure adjustment layer. I adjusted my exposure to +10, my offset to -0.0183 and my gama to 1.12 Again this is a to personal taste adjustment.
Exposure – lightens/darkens image.
Offset – adjusts shadow/highlight areas.
Gama – adjusts contrast.

Finally I added a Hue/Saturation adjustment layer where the only adjustment that I made was on the saturation slider which I increased by +25.
Hue - the color.
Saturation - how vivid the color is.
Lightness – how dark/light the color is.

If you want a more in depth look at these photoshop adjustments you can see the tutorial Fixing Exposure and Brightness. Although they don't use adjustment layers. They make the changes directly to the image. I prefer to work with layers so that I have the ability to go back into any of these adjustments and further tweak them as I go along. Using layers is what they call "non destructive photo editing." If you choose to work directly on your photo just be sure to never overwrite the original photo but save the edited photo under a different name. You never know when you may change your mind about the way you edited or your photo or when you may learn a new/better way of editing and want to try it again.

Of course how you choose to crop your photo can improve the impact of the photo as well. I like the closer crop of this photo in my Week 3 layout above better than looking at the entire image. To me there is just too much negative space in the upper left hand corner. OK... that is a wrap for me. I can't believe how much time it takes to put something like this together. Makes me appreciate all the great tutorials out there on the net even more. Have a great weekend!

P365 Week 2

January is just flying by! Here is my week 2 layout. It is all about Clayne since he just celebrated a birthday. I kept the look of the page similar to week 1 so that when I print my book it will coordinate with the page that is next to it. I am currently taking photos of a few subjects since I can't quite decide what I want week 3 theme to be. Right now I am leaning toward a winter theme.

So I did watch the photography class I mentioned in my previous post. It was pretty basic for the first week in the course but I learned things anyway because I need basics lol. I look forward to catching the class in the coming weeks to see what else I can learn. I had a few other things I wanted to post but I have to admit that I have been sucked into a book I am reading. Right now I am reading Catching Fire by Suzanne Collins. Last summer I read the first book in the series and have been impatiently waiting for this the second book. The first book is called The Hunger Games. If you are looking for a page turner, you ought to pick it up.


[Credits: Design 365 Seven Photo Masks-Simple By Carina Gardner, Design 365 Color Kit 1 By Carina Gardner, Design 365 A Month of Number Stamps By Carina Gardner, The Day Dreams Collection - Sunset Elements By Meredith Fenwick, The Day Dreams Collection - Sunrise Elements By Meredith Fenwick]

P365 Week 1

[Credits: Design 365 Seven Photo Masks-Simple By Carina Gardner, Design 365 Color Kit 1 By Carina Gardner, Design 365 A Month of Number Stamps By Carina Gardner, The Day Dreams Collection - Sunset Elements By Meredith Fenwick, The Day Dreams Collection - Sunrise Elements By Meredith Fenwick]

One week down in 2010 and 51 to go! I really can't believe that the first week is already over. Mine went really fast. I didn't get to scrap nearly enough LOL. There are so many wonderful new goodies at both my scrapbook homes Design House Digital and Scrap Orchard. I did however manage to scrap my first layout for P365 which focused on my goals for 2010. It is going to take a lot of organization for me to keep up with all I want to accomplish this year and I just found a wonderful product at DHD that will be so helpful for me. Click the image below to go check it out.

I have decided on my theme for my photos for this next week for P365. Clayne had a birthday a few days ago and I have decided that for a week around the birthday of myself, spouse or one of the kids that I will do a week of photos about them. I already have ideas flowing and am excited to get started. See larger images and more information about this planner at The Project Girl.

Project 365 in 2010

Here is my opening page for my album I will be creating this year for Project 365. I used the Journey 365 Jumbo kit by SuzyQ Scraps available at Scrap Orchard. Remember that Scrap Orchard will be back open on January 4 & if I remember right this kit is on sale! The stitching is by Carina Gardner & the template was a freebie from HERE.

Yep... I'm gonna try this again. I learned a few things when I took on Project 365 last year & hope to improve my approach this year. I am not going to beat myself up if every photo is not an awesome photo but I am going to make an effort to do all I can to improve my photography skills this year - well... all I can afford time to do or can find for free on the internet. I know that to take great photos is a big time investment & can also be a big financial investment.

What I hope to do is find at least one good photography tutorial each week (the tutorials I share may be on photo editing too because there is a lot I want to learn there too) and apply what I learn as well as share links to the tutorials when possible. I'm hoping to share what I learn on Thursdays each week on my blog.

So... yes you have probably figured out that one of my goals this year is to improve my photography. Over at Photojojo there is a fun article New Year's Just Ain't New Year's Without Photo Resolutions. In this article they share a list of 22 photo possibilities for the upcoming year. I know there are things on that list that I need to do.

I also plan to just share my Project 365 layouts each week rather than trying to upload my photo each day. If I feel like any of my photos are worthy of being featured outside of a layout I'll post those too. Anyway... I am just hoping to learn more from what I am doing this year. I also want my collection of 7 photos each week to be related in some way instead of completely random. I will have a theme of sorts each week for what I take photos of. This first week will be about my goals for 2010.

I spent some time researching how I wanted to approach Project 365 this year and came across a few things that you may find useful if you are joining in the project yourself this year. I know lasts year I struggled some days finding something worthwhile to photograph & I think these lists will help inspire me.
Creating Keepsakes has this list of 365 ideas to photograph
Carina is heading up the challenge at DHD and has a great list too
And one more list here on the left hand side of the blog

Of course viewing other people's blogs who are participating in the Project will inspire you too. If you are joining in be sure to link me up. I'd love to have a look.