Documenting the Stories...

So here's another two-page spread that was done about 15 years ago. It's got the nice photos, a couple of embellishments from some scrapbook store, but again (it's like it's my theme song) NO JOURNALING!

What year was this? Who are the people in the pictures, what was the occasion (other than Christmas)?

I decided that I wanted the focus of these pages to be the grandparents. This was the last Christmas they were both alive (Grandma passed in April of the following year) and I wanted to write a little bit about them on the pages.

So, like the original pages, I wanted one "grandma" and one "grandpa" page. First I pulled in the photos I wanted, chose a template that would showcase the pictures in the largest possible card slot, and went from there.

I own just about every single Christmas card kit there is, but like the plaid patterns that are available in the Comfort & Joy kit. Especially the red plaid.

I added a plaid filler card into the open space on the "grandma" page, and then used the new-in-the-last-PL-update Free Form Text feature, to add journaling to it.

I usually stick to the Amatic font in the PL app, but with the slightly "busy" plaid background, and the fact that the Amatic font is kind of skinny, it just got lost in the pattern of the card. So I opted to use a thicker font: Mouse Memoirs. It did the trick!

Now for the "grandpa" page...

I had more pictures I wanted to include on this one, so I picked a different template. Some people, when it comes to two-page spreads, like to keep the templates the same, but I let the number of pictures I want on the page dictate my template choice.

I repeated what I had done on the "grandma" page with the plaid filler card and added my "title". This time I used the FFT feature and actually added two different text boxes because I wanted the word Christmas to be bigger, and in a slightly more cursive-y font. I used the Kaushan font for that, because it was the only other thick font that (in my opinion) looked good with the other font I was using.

Finally, I added the "story" I wanted to a journaling card, and a matching card to include the date.

In all, this "analog to digital" conversion took me about 10 minutes, and most of that was messing around with fonts and arranging pictures in templates. But now I have another couple of pages to add to my growing digital collection, that all match, and more importantly TELL THE STORIES!