Digital Recipe Cards

I have been trying to take photos and make recipe cards for some of our favorite family recipes.  Each time we make something - out comes the camera!  I will use these for a recipe book to give each of our sons so they will be able to make some favorite foods.  I am doing these digitally so I can print as many as I want and they can be replaced if they get too messy from use.

I started with this photo of the shortcake as served.  The recipe is actually for the shortcake biscuits. I am sure that adding the strawberries and whipped cream won't be a challenge for our sons!

I used my Creative Memories StoryBook Creator Plus 3.0 software to create the recipe card.  I wanted to use just the image of the dessert so I used the custom cropping tool in the cut and fill menu to cut around the shape.  For some shapes you can use the magic wand to do this quickly, however, in this case there was not enough contrast between the parts of the photo I wanted and the background I was trying to eliminate.

This is a slow process as you add dots to outline your image.  Fortunately, you can zoom in as much as 1600 percent so it is possible to get very fine detail in your cropping.

Once you have the item outlined, you can click "invert shaded area" and you will see the image that will remain after cropping.  Then you click "erase the shaded area" to drop out the background.  I usually go ahead and save this new image as content so I can easily use it in another project.

After the tedious work of cropping the image, you can have fun choosing the papers and designing the card.  I used patterned paper from the Primary Power Palette  - this is one of my favorites with lots of bright cheery designs.

For additional decoration, I added some layers and created a strawberry using one of the many shapes available in the program.

I created two strawberries and filled them with coordinating papers from the Primary Power Palette.  I made the green cap by cropping the strawberry shape so I could layer the top on the original strawberry shape.  I grouped the two layers, reduced the size, and copied and pasted it four times to add a little more interest at the bottom border.

Here is the current version of the card - I may tweak it a bit more.  One of my favorite things about doing digital projects is that you can try out many variations without wasting any paper!

The actual recipe is on the back of the card.  I will print both sides and then cut and adhere them together.  Sometimes I plan the cards so that they will be matted on cardstock cut in a standard recipe card size.

Several people have asked if I will do a live online class for the Creative Memories software.  There are many tutorials and videos already on the CM website but I would be happy to have a question and answer session to help people who have the software but haven't really figured out how to use it.  If you want to be included in the Q and A, please leave a comment on this post or email me at capadiadesigns@gmail.com with the best days and times for you.  Remember to tell me what time zone you are in so I can try to coordinate a good time for all of those interested in this session.  I am a Creative Memories consultant so if you are interested in buying this software (and do not have a local consultant that you work with) you can purchase through me by visiting my CM personal website - here is a LINK.

I have been doing a little more experimenting with the updated Design Studio program.  I did not have enough time to do a video today but should be able to make a quick exploration video tomorrow.  I have not found any more new features but I will keep searching through the program to see if there are more changes.

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