Janice Daquila-Pardo

Back in the saddle

March 13, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

I apologize for my long-ish absence, gentle readers. I was at a social media conference for my business, which took a considerable amount of time and energy (as conferences usually do). If you’re into social media you may have heard of PubCon, which covers topics within the Internet marketing world—search engine optimization, Twitter and FaceBook marketing, affiliate programs, etc. The event was quite good, and now I have to corral all the great ideas swimming around in my head and start acting on some of them for our tech support business.

Needless to say, I missed my blog and am ready to get back to it! To get this week rolling I offer today’s layout. It’s a photo I took a few years ago of my mom and her younger brother. They live many states apart from one another and don’t have a lot of opportunities to be together. So even though this time was to attend the funeral of a dearly beloved aunt, I couldn’t let the chance slip away to capture some photos of the two of them.

My mom and her younger brother, Terry

This freeze-frame moment

March 2, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

Sketch #90 is now live at the Twisted Sketches blog. For this fun sketch “frame” was the twist. Here’s my interpretation:

Because I'm really good at faces I've picked out many celebrities in situations where nobody else noticed them.

The journaling on this layout may be hard to read: “I’m really good at recognizing faces. Always have been. I pick out celebrities in places where nobody else has noticed them. And when we watch movies I make it a sort of game to name in which other films or TV shows we’ve seen even the smallest of characters. Matt is always amazed.”

As usual there’s more to this story than I could fit on this layout. The fact is that since I was young I have been very quick to recognize a face if I have ever seen it before. For instance, when I was 9 years old (in 1976) my family, who was flying to California to visit my grandparents, was at the Cleveland airport. We were walking through the terminal when I recognized a man using a pay phone along the opposite wall and told my dad, “That’s Muhammad Ali.” My father didn’t at all think it was him, but I insisted. So we went closer. When we were just several feet away my dad finally agreed that it was the boxing legend. I was too shy to ask for his autograph, so my brother took a pen and our airline ticket envelope over to the man with the phone under his chin and got his signature. Phil has that autograph to this day, which I repeatedly tell him I deserve to have because I was the one who recognized Mr. Ali in the first place! Are you reading this, Phil?

Years later I recognized astronaut and senator John Glenn walking alone out to an airport parking lot. I was traveling with my husband and brother, and Mr. Glenn passed us as we were heading toward the terminal. Matt and Phil had no idea that we had just walked right past a living legend, but I will never forget that moment.

Over the years I have honed these skills so that now I almost instantly recognize/can name actors in shows we watch, no matter where or when I’ve seen them before (and often no matter how little of their faces I can see). Matt loves to pull up the Internet Movie Database to check my work. This little game has become part of the entertainment for us.

How megapixels translate to photo size

February 28, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

Because photos are so important to scrapbookers, I don’t think you can ever know too much about color correcting, sizing and printing yours. If you have a digital camera and prepare your photos to be printed online, at a brick-and-mortar developer or on your own printer at home, you need to understand how the resolution-to-dimension ratio works.

I have found a short and useful article called How Do I Figure Out How Many MegaPixels Are Necessary for Printing a Photo at a Specific Size? on Lifehacker.com, and I share it here in the hope that it helps make things clearer for you as it did for me.

Resistance is futile: 10 signs your family is a scrapbooking collective

February 24, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

The Borg: Resistance is futile. You know you’ve fully assimilated your family into your scrapbooking lifestyle when:

Your son correctly uses the word “bling” in a sentence.
Your daughter looks forward to shopping for new clothes to go with the patterned papers the FedEx man just delivered from Two Peas in a Bucket.
Your husband is helping your son build his science fair project and comes to your craft room to borrow your Crop-A-Dile.
Your brother calls to find out what colors his family should wear to the reunion so that it will work well for your scrapbook page.
Your kindergartner’s teacher mentions that your child is the only one who calls the Elmer’s glue “adhesive.”
Your husband looks at you in the middle of a fun family moment and says, “You have to scrap this!”
Your son shows confusion when they mention crop circles in an alien movie.
Your daughter complains that the construction paper at school isn’t acid free.
Your daughter asks to take your Copic markers to school for show and tell.
You and your mom don’t care about the Super Bowl or the Oscars, but you do organize a party at your house to watch the CHA reveals.

How do you know? Leave a comment to add your own. 🙂

Go green: Recycling your designs is good for creativity

February 23, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

Once you’ve created a layout would you consider it a crime to reuse that design? Are you a one and done kind of scrapper?

Let me show you why I believe designs should be a reusable resource in your scrap stash.

Just below is a layout I completed a while ago. It’s a portrait of my husband and his siblings when he was in high school. It’s a rather simple design that relies on good old-fashioned color blocking and a few embellishments.

This layout follows a simple color-blocked design.

Now here is another layout of Matt’s family, taken years later. I used the same design as the first; in fact, I didn’t even flip the side on which the photo is situated. Because the photo, patterned papers and embellishments are different the resulting designs really don’t resemble each other that much. In fact, I believe that unless I pointed out to someone looking at the family album that these two layouts share the same structure, they would be very unlikely to see that on their own. Even when held next to each other it’s the differences that take the viewer’s focus.

This layout follows the same color-blocked design but uses different papers and embellishments.

When you find a design you like, I say “reuse, recycle, re-imagine.”

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