My scrapbook layouts

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.

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.”

How to use a movie poster as scrapbook inspiration

February 21, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

After seeing the movie “Julie & Julia” in 2009—which intertwines the story of Julia Child’s start in the cooking profession with blogger Julie Powell’s challenge to cook all the recipes in Child’s first book—I received Julia Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” for Christmas. There’s a scene in the movie where Julie Powell has to cook dinner for a special guest and chooses to make Boeuf Bourguignon. Matt and I decided that would be the first dish we would try.

Let me tell you, you don’t just make Boeuf Bourguignon one day after work. This recipe takes several hours and requires some special ingredients that most of us don’t normally keep in our pantries. In our house when we undertake a project like that, we take photos.

My process

Julie & Julia movie poster When I was ready to scrap these photos I already knew what I wanted to title my layout. So I decided to look to the movie art for inspiration. First I looked up “Julie & Julia” on IMDB and thought the title treatment on the movie poster was something I could work with. I could cut out the title with my Silhouette, but what were those fonts?

So I searched on “what fonts are used on julie & julia poster?” and the most helpful result I found was on FontFeed. This site identified the two fonts used as Didot for the words Julie/Julia and Bernhard Modern for the ampersand. The problem was that I didn’t have either of those fonts, and I couldn’t find them on any free font sites.

Then I did another search for “fonts similar to Didot” and found identifont.com, where you can find lists of fonts that are similar to the one you’re looking for. Following this site’s recommendations I found replacement fonts within those that I already owned and I was able to go to town setting up my cut files in the Silhouette Studio software.

I decided to base my color scheme on the movie poster as well. Black and green factor heavily in what makes this poster pop, so I tried to use those colors. I found the perfect paper in my stash that combined the black and green from the poster as well as the red and gold in my photos. From all that came this layout. Bon appetit!

Charlie the Tuna, a pleated skirt and a jack-o-lantern smile

February 15, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

It is such a wonder to me that even photos from our past that have almost no visual context (like a school portrait) can bring back so many connected memories. In this horrible, wonderful photo of me from second grade I notice:

The sweet sweater vest my mom knit for me
My jack-o-lantern smile
The very precise way my hands have been arranged
That awful haircut (I mean, really?)
My Charlie the Tuna pin

The details that aren’t in this photo but that come flooding back to me just by looking at it are:

The way my classroom at Immaculate Conception School looked
My homeroom teacher, Mrs. Strittmatter
Being escorted up the hill to school every morning by the next-door neighbors’ dog, Barney
Watching in fascination as Mike Batiste, who sat in front of me, turned his paper upside-down to write his notes left-handed
How much I loved my shoes for that year, which were tan and navy tie ups with a turtle embossed on the side

Some photos might not tell you a lot about themselves at the outset. I have found that sometimes just sitting with a photo like this one and casting yourself mentally back to that time—to the feelings of that time—can work a little memory magic.

My second grade school portrait, 1974-75

Now for a little note about the design of this page (because I’m not sure if it’s obvious in the photo above). I wanted to imitate the skirt of my school uniform—a blue, gray, white and black jumper—so I pleated blue checked paper across the bottom section.

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