I haven’t had much time lately to work on my album, or my final assignment for Digi: In Deep, since Rob got called to umpire the Vancouver Canadians. He did a great job, and Kyle and I enjoyed being there to watch him. However, that left little time for other stuff! And, to top it off, Rob left this morning for the Grand Forks International tournament and won’t be back until late Monday. I managed to do the January layout last night from start to finish. The joy of templates! Hopefully I can get it finished this weekend and uploaded to Shutterfly to print it out!
Wow it’s been busy around here again! I’ve been working on a 24 page album (12 2-page layouts). So far I have finished July, August and September, 2006. I think they are pretty cool. We had to create our own templates to do it. I created one template on my own, and used Jessica Sprague’s inspiration design for the other one. Check it out:
Of other interest, my dear hubby has been asked to fill in as an umpire for a Vancouver Canadians baseball series this coming weekend. They were short an umpire and they called Rob! Congrats! Kyle and I will be at the games watching. He heads off to Grand Forks on Wednesday next week too.
It wasn’t until we had to do this layout for Digi: In Deep that I truly realized my baby’s 2. He has grown and changed so much in just 2 years I can’t believe it! For one thing, he talks. A lot. For another, he likes to watch Pixar movies. Well, okay, only Cars and Ratatouille really. Sometimes Finding Nemo. But mostly Cars. I think it’s his favourite movie of all time so far (I say this as he is watching it again, for probably the 100th time). Okay and maybe I’m obsessed with buying him things Cars related. It makes him happy. Okay, okay, it makes ME happy.
Anyway, Kyle has been funny and quirky right from the beginning, as you can see from the Then photo on the left. Today he’s just as quirky but in different ways. He says the funniest things (don’t all kids at this age?).
A month or two ago Kyle was playing and got grass stains on his knees. He was in his swing in the back yard and he asked “Daddy, what happened?”.
Daddy replied “You got grass stains on your knees”.
Kyle, looking at his knees says “Oh, dang.”
Now, I’ve watched Cars many a time. I think Mater only says “Oh, dang” once in the entire movie at the end when he finds his hood, sneezes and promptly loses it again. But for my not-quite two year old to say that, in proper context, is amazing. And hilarious. I think Rob loves telling that story.
The funniest thing is that I never thought that at this age I would understand Kyle, or have fun with him. I always told Rob that I would take care of our kids when they were babies, but as soon as they start talking they’re all his. I never understood kids and got frustrated trying to figure out what they wanted. Some kids, I can’t tell what they are saying for the life of me, but with Kyle I understand pretty much everything. Is it just me, or is everything he says clear as a bell? Okay maybe it’s just me.
Alright, enough reflecting! We’re doing a 24 page album this week for Digi: In Deep. I decided I would do Kyle’s first year – 12 two-page layouts. The trick is I have to create my own templates for them using the design principles we’ve been learning. Yikes. And they should have about 15 photos per layout (2 pages). We’ll see how well I do at the end of the week when we put them all together!
Now if only I could figure out what I’m doing wrong with my new prime 50 mm f1.8 lens for our camera! The edges of my subjects keep turning out too soft and not quite in focus. I’m a bit disappointed, but I’m sure we’ll figure it out. If anyone has any tips for me???
On December 29, 2007 we had a surprise luncheon for Rob’s grandmother’s 90th birthday. She had no idea we were throwing her a surprise party! It was a great afternoon. Rob’s sister Angela put together a memory book for Anne (aka Gigi). It was a beautiful compilation of photographs from friends and family and commemorated all the stages of Gigi’s life so far. It was wonderful to watch Gigi and her two sisters going through all the photos and reminiscing. Rob presented a slide show. Rob’s dad Brian did some reasearch and prepared a cool list of important events from 1917 and some of the major milestones during Gigi’s lifetime.
For Week 1 of Digi: In Deep, when I first looked at the layout we were doing, I knew right away I had to do Gigi’s birthday. I love the scrollwork added to the title and the hint of red in the strips on the bottom left would work perfectly with the main photo I had in mind. I know Gigi will probably hate this photo, but I love the fact that she’s hiding behind the napkin. She just has this mischievious look in her eye that really captures my attention. I really like the half-circle embellishment, it’s a great accent.
This assignment wasn’t overly difficult, but it was definitely more difficult than Now We’re Rockin’. There were more tasks to complete as well. The part that took me the longest was figuring out what to write on the accent strips and in my journaling. It’s surprising how few poems or quotes relate to someone who’s turning 90! I finally found a quote that I liked from Oprah.
The one very cool thing that I learned was how to re-colour items using the Image-Adjustments-Replace Color feature. You have to be careful using this though because it is a permanent change. So if you don’t want to change the original image, you have to make sure to either do not save the changes when you close, or create a duplicate document and then make the changes. When you are using this feature, you have a couple of ways you can make the selection for what you want to recolor. You can click in the area you want to recolor, and then use the slider to make the selection more solid (the selected area you want to re-colour changes color to white, as opposed to the “marching ants”), or you can shift+click a few times throughout the area until you get the selection you would like. Very cool.
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