HYBRID | MINI ALBUM

In April I spent some days in Southern France for the holidays. I created a hybrid album to keep memories of these days that I would like to share with you.

I used Tales of Spring | Papers for my album and I picked up elements from several Pink Reptile Designs products.

For starters, I printed all papers and elements, after having recolored some of them to better match my photos:


I cut several rectangles in white cardstock to create my pages and dividers.

I organized the pages and the photos in front of me, on my scrapbooking table, to know how to decorate each couple of pages and its divider:



Then I began the creation of my album.
I'll show you some examples of pages of my album.

For the first divider, I used a paper from Tales of Spring and stuck a floral tape from If Only | Elements underneath it, then I adhered the photo on top:



After that, some die cuts and a tag  from More Than Words.



As a finishing touch, I also added a paper clip.

On the back side of the divider, again some die cut leaves [made with Cuttlebug].



And then a cute ice cream element Tales of Spring stuck in there with a 3D autoadhesive foam to add a bit of depth.



The divider between two pages of my album.





Another example:



For this page, I used a tag from More Than Words, a wordart from Tales of Spring, leaves that I cut from a Tales of Spring paper, and more die cut leaves.

The complementary page is this one :



And here's the divider:



With a paper from Tales of Spring as background:



Die cut leaves



The photo



A tag from More Than Words,  and a kiwi from Bakers Gonna Bake:




And one more page:









The next step was the piercing holes to bind the pages together and create my album:






And finally I made the cover of the album.























And album is finished!



As always I hope you enjoyed my post and if I inspired you in any way, shape or form then by all means make a photo of your project and upload it to your gallery so you can leave a link in the comment section below! I'd love to see what you made! 

BLOG CHALLENGE MAY

Hello friends!!! Welcome to the June blog challenge! This month, we are so excited to bring you another team based challenge, but before we share the details we need to announce the winner for May's Tag Template challenge!!! You can take a look at all the amazing entries HERE.

The lucky winner for this month is Psychozoe!!!

Congratulations Psychozoe aka Susie!!! You have a notification on your TLP account.
All other participants also received their 25% discount coupons via their Lilypad accounts. Please make sure you check your messages everyone and if your coupon didn't come through send an e-mail to pinkreptiledesigns at gmail dot com!

Here's Susie's gorgeous page:

Who’s ready for a Round Robin Recipe Challenge?

The way this will work is you will be put in teams of three to work on a scrap recipe. You each will work on individual pages on your own, but you will be directing each other as to what goes on the page. Each of you will take a turn and decide on three “ingredients” (or instructions) to add to the scrap recipe. Your team will have a name, and when you post your instructions here in the forum thread, please make sure you indicate your team name in bold first, followed by your three instructions. This way your team mates can find the instructions that they need to follow to complete their pages. As a team, make sure you have the "essentials" covered. For example someone should give instructions for at least one photo and someone should include instructions for your background paper(s). Once each member of your team provides their instructions for your scrap recipe, you can begin working on your individual page!

All teams can add:
- a date,
- a title and
- journaling if they wish.

These are optional/extras to add to your page as per your preferences and do not need to be part of the instructions. But if you wish to instruct your team to do something challenging with a title you can! ***But nothing else beyond these 3 optional items and your team's instructions should be added to the page!

So for instance if I am on Team Patterned Paper. I will post my set of 3 instructions for my team like this as an example:

Team Patterned Paper
1) Add three papers (any kind- solid/patterns) to make up your background – how you arrange them/layer them is up to you, as long as we can see 3 papers.
2) Add 3 photos – 1 large rectangle (this will be the focal photo), 2 smaller squares.
3) Add a frame around the large rectangle (focal) photo.

Everyone on Team Patterned Paper, including me, will follow these instructions along with the 3 instructions by the other members of Team Patterned Paper. At the end you can reveal your pages so we can all see what everyone came up with.  Sound Fun? Then join us! Sign up in this Designer Challenge forum thread at The Lilypad.

And as an example, three of our CT decided to play along. They were Team Washi. Take a look at what they did:

Ellen's instructions:

Team Washi Tape

1  Start with solid color background.

2  Add 5 different layers (or pieces) of patterned paper.  Any shape, any arrangement.

3  Add some lace or flowers, or both.

Gaelle's instructions:

Team Washi Tape

1- add some paint

2- add a frame

3- add some washi tape

Carrie's instructions:

Team Washi Tape

1. Add One Photo

2. Add some stitching

3. Add some word art

And their pages following the Team Washi Tape recipe:

by Ellen


by Gaelle


by Carrie


Now it's your turn! We can't wait to see what you all create!

Make sure you use at least 75% of Pink Reptile Design products on your page. Once completed, just upload your page to one or all of your galleries and post a link to your layout in the comments section of this post before the next challenge goes live on July 15th.

ONE favorite page will be chosen as the winner to receive a 10 dollar coupon to the PRD store, but really everyone is a winner, as all other participants receive a 25% discount coupon to the Pink Reptile Designs TLP store. So all the more reason to join in on the fun, right?!

FUN WITH FONTS | GIVE THOSE GLYPHS A GO!

Hey scrapping friends. I'm here with a new series Fun with Fonts where I'll share some quick tips and tricks for making the most of all those fonts I know you are hoarding! Today's tip is all about using the gorgeous glyphs that come with so many of our fonts.

I don't know about you, but I get excited when I download that perfect font with all those beautiful extra characters with the fancy flourishes. So, I install the font, but when I go to type out my beautiful title I often am left feeling let down. Why? Because I need to remember to use those glyphs! Photoshop now has a special Glyphs Panel that makes it so easy to find and actually use those pretty special characters! (I think the Gylphs panel was introduced in the full version of Photoshop with the CS release? Not sure.) But to access it, go to your menu bar at the top of the screen, click on Window and then select Glyphs to open the panel.



I'm using Andara Script and just playing around with the word Script to see what I can come up with. To start, type your text. As you can see it isn't flourishy or anything overly special. But in the Glyphs panel type in the name of the font to see all the special characters that are available for this specific font.



You can highlight the letter you'd like to change, in this case let's see how we can jazz up the "S", and then scroll through all the beautiful choices in the glyph panel. When you find what you like, simply double click it and it will replace the original S in your text. Here is what my S looks like after choosing a fancier S from the glyphs panel.



You can also highlight the character in your text and just hover over it and the Alternate Glyphs box will appear (providing you didn't play around with your preferences options) giving you all the alternate choices for that specific character. Just click the one you like and it will replace it. I also changed out the "t" in my text. Here's that little alternate glyphs pop up window:



And here's the word Script with the pretty new S and lovely little t. Adorable right?



Here's another example with a word, maraschino, that I am actually going to use as my title on my layout. I have it typed out as is, followed by an example where I used glyphs for the M and the o, and then the last example I used the Character Panel to increase the height of the "o" so it wasn't quite so close to the dot on the "i". Have a look:



To change the height of the "o", highlight it and then open the Character Panel. The Vertical Scale tool (the icon looks like a T with an up/down arrow in front of it). Increase the size to slightly higher than it is already to create some space between the flourish of the "o" and dot of the "i". You can also highlight the "i" and scale it down to create a little more space. Here is the Vertical Scale tool in the Character Panel:



And here is my fancy glyph-tified title on my layout!



So please, if you have a gorgeous font that you want to use for a title, consider digging out those glyphs and seeing how you can fancy up your page and make it just a little more special.

If you don't have Photoshop you can still get to these glyphs. These tricks should work in Photoshop Elements and other programs that utilize fonts. Try them and if you are having difficulty do a little googling for your program or try a different font. Here's what I found when googling how to get access to glyphs in Windows:

From your start menu, search for Character Map and open it up. Select the font you want to work with. Click on the new character/glyph you'd like to use. Click the Select button, then the Copy button. Go to your program and select the character that you want to replace by highlighting it. Then press Control + V to paste it in. You should have the fancy new glyph character instead of the original character you typed.

For Mac:

In Finder search for Font Book and open it. Type in the name of the font you are working with. The tool bar up top has a row of icons. Choose the 2nd one and this will give you every option available for that font. When you see the special character/glyph you'd like to use, select it, then press CMD + C to copy it. Go back to your program and highlight the character that you want to replace. Press CMD + V to paste in the new glyph.

Give it a try and jazz up those titles!