May Crafting

I have updated some of my cards I have made this month onto the Docrafts website under member name lexon5. Please take a look and comment.

As an ongoing update, I am still unable to blog due to my arm playing up so apologies for my absence but I have to put health first. I have lots of ideas saved in my head for new blog topics when I am back up and running. For now all I can do is keep you posted with the few creations I have been able to make. Please check them out at www.docrafts.com

Freebies Update

I won! I cant believe it.

Previously I had posted that I had finally got around to entering some craft competitions and I am pleased to announce that I won one of them. I won the Craft Artist Scrapbooking Serif programme so in the next few days I will be loading it up and posting a review of what I think of the product. Am really chuffed and of all the prizes I entered for I think that this one if probably the most valuable to me. I believe it will be useful in helping me to design layouts for my scrapbooking and am excited to see what other functions the programme has. I'll keep you posted. x

Photograph Storage and Organisation

I am typing this from my new laptop which will hopefully help me be able to update this blog more which is great news. I am also hoping that it will help with my own personal crafting. Once I have made my cards I can photograph them and upload them direct onto here and my Docrafts account. I have updated Docrafts today with some of my cards and scrapbooking I managed to make in April aswell as updating my blog on there too.

I've spent today collating all the photographs I have which I think would be good to scrapbook with into one big folder and put it on my laptop. The idea is that as the laptop is portable I can take it into the craft room and put the image on 100% zoom then work with what I have in the room to see what matches -colours, embellishments, patterns, layouts. This should help cut down on waste as at the moment I print small images out on paper and try and match everything up from that. The problem with this, as well as waste of paper, is that the small size sometimes hinders the process as its harder to visualise the finished product and because colours of images come out different on paper than to photo paper. How do you guys arrange your images ready for scrapbooking? Do you print them out in a set size and have them stored together in your room? Do you use computer software to help you chose the size or use colour management programmes to tweak imperfect photographs? Let me know by leaving a comment.

I remember seeing a programme where you can give each photograph multiple labels and then link similar ones together. For example a photograph of me and my boyfriend in Central Park would be put into multiple folders using the labels travel, nature, together. If anyone knows which programmes can do this please let me know as it sounds like a brilliant way of organizing your images. I have a folder which has pictures of my nephew in it but also have pictures of him in the folder for days out and birthday parties. I don't want to double up the photos as it would increase the size of the overall folder dramatically and I already have about 8gb of photos.