Catching Up: Slide Show, Contest, etc

I can't believe how long it has been since my last post! It has been a very hectic time. Most of May I was consumed in putting together a slide show. Let me explain. For several years I have been the parent volunteer in charge of my children's elementary school yearbook (some years by myself and some years with partners). Since this was my youngest's last year at the school, it was also my last year for the yearbook. Well, the yearbook went to the publisher in April (it came out awesome by the way!!), and about that time I was asked about putting together a slide show for the end of year awards ceremony and also the end of year party. Since I have been taking digital photos of the kids the past five years for the yearbook, I had tons of pics. In order to have a lot of pictures of all the students in the class and still keep the length of slide show to about 10 minutes, I had to "scrap" the pictures to include multiple photos on each slide. This became a HUGE job!! I will probably shortly write a separate blog entry on how I did the slide show and the lessons learned since I had such a hard time finding information online. Fortunately, the slide show was finished on time and was a big hit with the students, parents and school staff. (Yeah!)

So after the slide show was finished in the beginning of June, it was on to fixing some computer problems. My older son's computer has a very serious virus and we still don't have it running, but we have managed to salvage what he needed from the hard drive. Then it was time to try to get the wireless network printer to work again. It stopped talking to the computers after a short power outage in mid-May. Luckily, I was able to get that working in spite of the lack of help from HP technical support - who informed me it's out of warranty! So with the printer back up and running there was partial success on the computer issues! I also needed to catch up on some genealogy correspondence and postings, and I really, really wanted to get back to scrapbooking - both layouts and design.

Earlier in May, before the slide show completely took over, I posted a layout at SAS for their heritage layout of the month contest. I was absolutely thrilled to find out I won the challenge and got a gift certificate to their online store!!! So, I think on that note, I'll end this rambling and post the layout below. The kit used is LilyPond - a free a SAS welcome kit. The photo is four generations of my Evans/Shaner/Miller line. The man holding the baby is my great-grandfather, Harry Evans. Standing next to him (probably on a box to make her taller) is his wife, Minnie Shaner Evans. Next to Minnie is her mother, Adeline Miller Shaner. Seated in the front is Adeline's step-mother, Elizabeth Fritz Miller. The baby is Harry Evans Jr. and the little girl is Cora Evans. They are the older siblings of my grandmother.

A Layout with my Asian Inspired Kit

Lately I have been so caught up in designing that I haven't made any layouts in a while. So I decided I needed to do something about that. As a result, I made this somewhat non-traditional heritage military page with my Asian Inspired mini-kit. The photo was one of the few Asian-themed ones that I have, so I thought it kind of fit!? I also want to scrap a page with the Happy Spring kit. I have an Easter photo from a few years ago that I think will work great -- now I just need to find it and scan it!

Vintage Layout with Patterned Paper

I just learned a very easy way to make patterned paper from the tutorial posted at CountryDreamzScrappin by Joani. I tried it out with a snippet of vintage wallpaper from the GraphicsFairy. To complete the layout, I 'stapled' the patterned paper to a background page and then added a cluster frame from RaspberryRoadDesign along with my photo and journaling. The result is the layout posted below.