Project 52: Week 37

This week I made a page for our afternoon in Boca. I actually made three total pages for that day so far, so I’ll put them all in this post.

First up is the one I made for the P52 challenge. I cannot get enough of LO’s with full page photos!

Journaling reads- The beach at Boca. It had been raining off and on all day so we didn’t stay very long. We walked along the pier and watched some people skimming. I’d never seen that before, It was pretty neat. There weren’t many people braving the drizzles. We walked along the pier and talked. It’s been a few weeks since we’ve taken many pictures so I think we were a bit out of practice. It was great to get out into the world and smell the ocean. I’m so glad we got out and explored. It had been awhile. We really needed that. September 13, 2014

(And now I realize that by “awhile”, I really meant “two weeks” since we’d been to a beach. But it felt like much longer).

Credits: Nature’s Delight and A Simple Love by Simple Girl Scraps

The next page is a re-do of a LO I made with the Project Life app. I like this version much better. They’ll go next to each other in my Coral Springs area album. I used the Midnight PL kit inside the app.

And finally, I had to make a page for the Tesla. I did this one for the template challenge at GS. (Also, I asked Jason if the Valentine hearts and flowers made him feel emasculated in his LO and he was fine with it 😛 )

Credits: Project 2012 February by Connie Prince

That’s kind of a lot of pages for one day, but I was just so happy to have my scrapping mojo coming back that I went a little nuts. It’s all good though 🙂

*Project 52 is my attempt to do one page every week about a “current event”. These LO’s will tell longer stories about an event or theme, and be placed in my Library of Memories system. They are separate from my Project Life pages, which are more of an overview of our week. Here are more of my P52 pages.

#30Lists September 2014 (part 1)

I’ve been doing 30 Days of Lists for a couple of years now. I love doing the lists, but I’m terrible at the follow through, that is actually making something with my lists. Should I do a mini book? Add them to Project Life? Make layouts, or just show them in blog posts? The “finishing” has always been my stumbling block.

Enter the Project Life app.

I really liked the neutral look of Megan’s lists from awhile back using the physical Midnight kit, so I went with that one, which comes free in the PL app. I picked a few journaling cards and added my lists, which I’d written in August and September. (Except the first one, which I rewrote to reflect the day I made the LO). As with every page I’ve made with the app, it was super quick and easy.

So the next question is, where am I going to put it? It doesn’t really fit in with my no-product Project Life this year, so I’m going to print it out and stick it into my All About Jen album. I think I’m going to do that with my 30 Lists from now on. I might even go back and redo some of my other lists and add them in there too.

I’ll share the rest of September’s lists probably next month. I’m not 100% sold on the font I used, so I want to get it printed and make sure I can read it before I use it for any more other pages. (Not the font’s fault, I just have a harder time reading thin fonts)

Curious about 30 Lists? Learn more here. You can see more of my lists here.

More fun with the Project Life app

Here are a couple more of the pages I’ve made with the PL app. I wanted to do some experimentation to see how hard it would be to bring some of my own digi supplies into the app.

I used this tutorial from Steph at the Daily Digi as a guide. I uploaded cards from Are We There Yet? collab by Mommyish and Just Jaimee to Dropbox. It was pretty easy to plop them into the template in the app as if they were regular photos.

The trickier part came when I wanted to add text to my title card (top left on the first page) Since you can’t add text to “photo” slots in the PL app, I used a workaround. I found a card I liked via Dropbox, then saved it to my camera roll. Then I opened the card in the Over app and added my title and a bit of journaling. I saved the finished card to my camera roll, then added it to the PL app.

It was a relatively painless process, but more time consuming than using the cards provided in the app itself. I’m hoping they’ll add the ability to add text on a photo in an update. From what I’ve seen, that’s a pretty popular request. I think once they add that, I’ll make a lot more pages using my own kits. For right now, it’s a lot faster for me to scrap on my computer if I want to use kits from outside the app.

Also, Steph said in her article, but it bears repeating- If you want to use other apps in addition to Project Life, plan ahead and pay attention to the dpi of your exports! Don’t let all your hard work go to waste and end up with fuzzy pages because an app exported your LO at 72 dpi. Do your fancy journaling first, then add the photos to the PL app, not vice versa. That’s my public service announcement for the day 🙂

Playing with the Project Life app

I was skeptically optimistic when I heard Becky Higgins was doing an iPhone app. Though I’m a huge fan of Becky and the whole PL system, I think her digital products are overpriced for the digital market. Most of her core kits are $20, and I will never pay that much for a kit, unless it’s for charity.

I was pleasantly surprised at the pricing for the app. You get a few card sets free with the $2.99 app, and you can purchase additional ones for $0.99-1.99. The app comes with several template styles and photo collage templates. You can also purchase more if you’d like. I found the whole pricing structure much more reasonable than her other digital products (although I’m not sure if you’re getting the entire kit when you purchase through the app. I will confirm this when she adds more kits that I own)

I love that you can choose between squared and rounded corners. The cards fit well into the slots for either choice. I love the ease of it all. I did three pages in an afternoon. It was so fast! I love that I can easily scrapbook on the couch while Jason watches football. I like that I’m getting to use kits that I wouldn’t be able to buy at the regular digital price. I super love that when you type onto a journaling card, the text wraps around perfectly so you’re not typing over the embellishments on the card. I can’t even do that in PSE!

A few things that I’d like to see in future updates- An option for drop shadows, either within the app, or an option to export the templates on a transparent background so we can add our own. This might not be a big deal for paper scrappers using the app, but I’ve heard several digiscrappers complain about this. We don’t like flat looking pages. I’d also like to be able to write text on the photo spaces. There are workarounds to this by using other apps to add writing, then importing those into the PL app, but it would be nice to be able to skip this step. The photo editing in the PL app is extremely basic. You definitely want to do that in a different app as well.

How I plan to use the app. I probably won’t use this app for everyday scrapbooking. I love the clean look of my PL pages this year, but I will definitely consider using the app to catch up on previous years. I have a feeling that I’ll use the app a lot on multi photo collage type pages. Pages where I have a ton of photos, but I’m not really inspired to make pages with them so they’ve been sitting on my HD for years types of pages. Travel, scenery, holidays, etc.

Here are the pages I’ve made so far with the app-

This was the first one I made, using the Midnight kit. I just used pictures I had in my camera roll and made a quick little page about what MK has been up to lately. I think I used the photo editing within the app, but I might have used Pic Tap Go.

The other photos on my camera roll were from our recent day in Boca. I used the Kraft kit and one of the Squared Away templates (in-app purchase). The Kraft kit doesn’t have square cards, so they’re a bit wonky looking. But I like it, it looks different.

This is where I started getting really excited about the app. I’ve been wanting to scrap our 2009 trip to California lately. The photos needed a lot of help, so I edited them in RadLab on my computer. I created a “To scrap” folder in Aperture and shared it with my iPad. I was then able to use the edited photos in the PL app. I did all of that, including buying the Travel kit and putting the page together, all in less than 15 minutes. That’s when I figured out exactly how I wanted to use the app and how it would impact my scrapbooking. I was so excited!

I’m also really excited to try scrapbooking on the go. We’ll be going up to New Orleans this fall, so that will be the perfect opportunity to test it out! I can see myself scrapbooking in all sorts of exotic locations. The memory keeping possibilities for our summers alone are endless.

Has anyone else out there tried the app? I’d love to hear about your experiences and see your pages 🙂

These are numbers 6-8 of 25 pages I want to make in September.