Thursday, January 1, 2015

Studio J for the Life of Me

Last week I was honored to receive one of our new D-ring albums as a prize for being one of the five consultants with the most customer participation in creating Studio J layouts in November.
I fell in love with incredibly easy way to preserve memories a few years ago.  Since then, I have been steadily making pages that will leave a record of my life for those that come after me.
Hopefully what you see here can inspire you to start your own life history record.  It will be
PRICELESS!!!
 This is a layout of a scanned discharge from the Civil war from my Great, Great Grandfather.
I created the background in the No Limits design.  This is two 12 x 12 photo wells so the layout is built from the bottom up as if you would layer paper.  So easy!  
For this layout of my grandparents, I selected the page design, eliminated all the photo wells on the right side, and created new photo wells for the scanned obituaries.  It is a tremendous advantage to manipulate the photo wells now.  My grandmother's obituary is especially poignant
and talks about her faith and example.  I never knew her since she died before I was born.
Again I selected a layout design and put in my own photo wells to hold the scans of letters my Dad wrote my Mother 60 years ago.  I even scanned the envelope with a 3 cent stamp and it is it's original size.   Those details make your layout interesting.
For this one, I had mounted the newspaper clippings on black cardstock and took them to a printing store to have a scan made of the 12 x 12 page.  They put the scan on my flashdrive.
I then opened Studio J and put each page in the No Limits layout design.  I pulled in the paper and embellishments from the selected La Belle Vie kit to finish the pages.  Newspaper clippings are from 1966 and had been improperly mounted in an old book.  Now they are preserved well.
I had barely started these pages on real paper.  I had what was done scanned (the 12 x 12 page), put each page in No Limits and then embellished with Studio J Notebook nameplates and such.  In this instance I had hard copies of the photos already mounted on the paper.  However, I could match Studio J with the existing paper because Notebook was in Studio J.  I cannot remember exactly, but there are over 120 paper kits to choose from.  Your favorite is sure to be there!
 When I was in high school, my sister and I were part of a singing group at church.  We went all over central Illinois giving concerts.  We cut a long play album which was unusual for the time.
I had the cover of the album scanned and put the pictures in No Limits again.  I was able to add some thoughts in a journaling box on the right side.
Well, I will stop for now.  I have a guide to help you get started in Studio J if you would like.
Just email me at pajarrett@comcast.net and I will email it to you.  I guarantee if you get started, you will be excited about what you accomplish and it will be a treasure for years to come.
Keep Studio J-ing!
Pam