AAM Monday Project Life Week 26

For a lot of my recent Project Life layouts, I have been making my templates with an action from Mommyish at The Lilypad. At first I thought it would be too hard, but wow was it easier than I thought and I love playing round with the various shapes. I did come to the conclusion that, for now, I really prefer square edges to rounded ones. That of course may change as I found the rounded ones a nice change for images etc back when that design hit the scrapping world. As long as it's fun, I'll continue this project. And for now, it is!

Just a bit more about what I've done after the basics of the template making.The action allows you to place the various sized shapes on a base which has a lot of guides to allow the shapes to 'snap to guide.' I then add a drop shadow to all the shapes, and then add a blank layer UNDER the original base.

After I put my photos, cards etc on, I select all the layers ABOVE the new base, hit CMD T (CNTRL T on PCs) and reduce the size to 95%. That gives me visual space for the true background paper - here the yellow ones. Yes there are two papers there with one used as an overlay. I rarely use a lot of patterned papers but this allows me to still have fun with them.

And really the final thing I do template wise is to take everything above that original white base and reduce that to 99%. I wanted to see more white than the action originally allows. Then add the elements that I haven't added earlier and decide what papers to use.  I'm loving it!

click her to see action in store

AAM Monday: Project Life Week 25

Somehow I 'felt' as if I was a month behind in doing this project. Not quite accurate so it appears I cannot always trust my mind but then I've learned that to be true a lot.  How I think things are don't always reflect reality.  A mind can be a trickster!

However, I was quite happy with the way week 25 came out. I hope you enjoy seeing it too!

I have really enjoyed making some templates with Mommyish's Template Maker action. It gives me the chance to keep to the basic square corners that I prefer but still make rounded corner templates once in a while. I've kept to the ¼" space between the blocks but resized the completed template to be 95% which allows me to have that green border underneath. I've tested using a 90% reduction but I'm not sure I like that enough. Maybe when I have little or no text on the page or for an album with a nice white border I'll use 90%.  A wide border will give you templates that look like Cathy Ziellske's.

One of these days I'm also going to play with the 8.5x11 and the 6x8 sizes which are included. You can get this action HERE at The Lilypad. I was happy to get it during the INSD sale!