Creative Memories Cricut Cruise Contest starts today!

Today is the first day of the Creative Memories Cruisin' With Cricut Contest.  I am one of five consultants who qualified to submit a layout and now our layouts will be posted on the Creative Memories Home Office Fan Page for people to vote for their favorite.  If you are on Facebook, I'd really appreciate it if you would take the time to visit the page and (I hope!) vote for my layout.  If you would ask your friends and connections on Facebook to also vote for me that would be fabulous!  Apparently you can vote once a day for the next week - the voting ends on November 23rd.

Here is a LINK to the contest page. If that doesn't work, here is a LINK to the Creative Memories Home Office page.

I'd love to win this cruise and take my husband on a fabulous anniversary trip - we will be married 30 years in January so this would be perfect timing.  Who knows - maybe I could even get him to do some crafting!

I decided to do a heritage page and used the Reminisce Accents cartridge. We had to use Creative Memories products exclusively for the layout which was easy - I chose the wonderful Reminisce papers and used both the paper and the digital versions to create my page.  Here is a Design Studio screen shot of my final preview for the layout design.

The gray areas represent photos of my grandmother, my mother and myself all taken when we were about 18 years old.  My grandmother's photo was taken in 1910, shortly before she was married.

My mother's photo is her high school gradutaion photo.  I tried both scanning and taking new photos of the images.  Sometimes the scanner is so sensitive that it picks up the texture of the paper in older photos and a new photo of the heritage photo will give you a better image to work with.

My photo is from a theater production in my first year of college and was taken by Flip Schulke, a famous photographer for Life, National Geographic and other magazines (his daughter was a friend and classmate).  It was the only photo I could quickly find of myself at that age - I need to get some more photos from my Dad.  It is in a permanent frame but I had scanned it before it was framed so I had the digital image.

By bringing all three photos into my Memory Manager 3.0 software, I was able to edit them to have a fairly uniform color and intensity.

I did some test cuts using other papers just to make sure that my sizes and placement were accurate.  I only had a few sheets of each paper so I wanted to avoid making a mistake on my "good" paper.  The photos were sized at 2 1/2 inches square and the rest of the layout fills in the open areas.

I knew I wanted to add quite a bit of journaling so I decided to do the photo section of the page as an 8 x 8 digital layout.  This also helped me to make the photos just the right size and further adjust the color balance to make the images as similar as possible in tone.  I used the same papers in the digital Reminisce Power Palette to keep the look consistent.

I created the digital layout in StoryBook Creator Plus 3.0.  I started by creating a page map for myself with the photo and text sections carefully aligned.  (I use high contrast colors to help see whether I have everything properly aligned).

Then I could click and fill the areas and type in my text.  I color matched the blue to the background paper and also worked out the spaces to leave for the names that I welded in the Reminisce font and cut with Design Studio.

I welded two border sections to the top and bottom of a rectangle to create the frame or mat for the 8 x 8 page.  I made a few tiny adjustments in Design Studio to get the cut size to work out evenly.  I used my Precision Point adhesive to attach the blackout borders to the back of the frame.

 

The Precision Point Adhesive was essential for the names.  I put a tiny dot of adhesive directly on the page so I could add the dot of the "i" in the proper position.  The Reminisce Accents font welds beautifully and it cut nicely from the Brick cardstock.

 I used my clear layout ruler (available at any art store) to help me keep the long "Generations" title straight on the page.

Here you can see the layers of the page and also see what a good match the digital and physical papers are.  I was able to apply soft edges to the photos and the journaling spaces to help smooth everything together.  I printed the layout on matte photo paper and trimmed it to fit the page.  I added another layer ( 8 1/4 x 8 1/4 inches) of the same gold paper I used for the title and frame blackouts to mat the layout.

I tried to stay true to the mission of letting the pictures and journaling be the focus of the page - but still add some interest with the lovely cuts from Reminisce Accents.  I tend to be a "flat scrapper" and prefer pages that I will put in albums to be free of extreme 3 dimensional elements.  A page that I might frame is another matter entirely!

If you have any questions about the materials or techniques I used, please leave a comment or email me.  If you could help spread the word and "get out the vote" for me  I would really appreciate the help!  I "need" to be on this cruise - my friend Okie needs some adult supervision!

Once again here is the LINK to the contest page and here is the LINK to the Creative Memories Home Office page.  You can vote once each day - the contest closes next Tuesday, the 23rd.  Thank you!

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