4 photos

There’s always room for ice cream

October 9, 2013 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

I know it's hard to believe, but I actually do love these two more than ice cream.

I thought I would share a Silhouette technique today. I had a lot of fun concocting this layout in my head, then in my Silhouette Studio software and finally in physical form.

I completed this look by building the page as much from the back as from the front. Here’s how:

I was looking for a novel way of highlighting my main photo, so I started surfing my Silhouette library for ideas. When I saw this “Folded Sunburst Card” shape, the light bulb went on. Why not cut the sunburst aperture from my background paper and put the photo behind it?
the Silhouette shape I used to highlight my main photo

So I opened the file and deleted all the card bits, leaving only the sunburst. I re-sized the shape to be a little smaller than a 4 x 4 photo and dragged it to the top third of a full 12 x 12 page in Silhouette Studio.

To add to the building from beneath theme, I set up my title to cut from the background paper as well. So that I would be sure to leave enough room between the sunburst and the title for the other photos I planned to use, I added those to the design in Silhouette Studio but I set them to “no cut.” Like this:
How my file looked before cutting

So that’s it. I laid down my patterned paper (from My Mind’s Eye “Cut and Paste: Flair” collection), cut this out all at once, backed it with white card stock and then built my page on top of it. And now I have a layout that has lots of depth and texture without lots of bulk.

Oh, and the photos are from a stop we made at a neat little ice cream place in North Carolina while I was home visiting Mom and Phil this August.

Out & about

March 25, 2013 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

Building my whole layout around tags was new for me, and I'm really happy with the look.

This layout was fun to pull together! I gathered four photos of Matt and me just out doing our thing in Austin last December. The north photo is of us waiting for our friends’ wedding to start; the east photo is when we were waiting outside the Alamo Drafthouse before seeing Les Miserables; the south photo is us waiting for our lunch to arrive at Cheddars; and the west photo is when we scored the fireplace table at La Madeleine.

My friend, Laurie, published this cool sketch on her blog and is running a contest with it for her birthday. Isn’t that a great idea? I decided to use the tags as my main focus but configure them a little differently by arranging them in a circle. I’ll tell you, using the Studio Calico cloud background paper with the grid really helped make aligning everything easier. I cut the eight tags out of another piece from the same SC “Here & There” collection and then embellished each. To bring it all together I created a circular title treatment on my Silhouette. I really like my final result, and I would’t have come up with this idea without Laurie’s sketch for inspiration.

Happy birthday, my friend!

UPDATE: The happy news is that I won this sketch contest! Thanks for the Amy Tangerine stitching template kits, Laurie. I can’t wait to use them on my pages. 🙂

Homecoming 1984

November 7, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

I went to the dance with Mike Lisi, and my brother took Jill Berlin.

A lot of my Facebook friends have children in high school, so I’ve seen my fair share of homecoming photos being posted lately. You know, shots of their high schooler with his/her date and friends and parents in front of the family room fireplace.

Exactly like we did before our homecoming dance in the fall of 1984! Not a lot changes over the years, does it? OK, maybe the fashions have changed a lot. 😉

Our dates came to our house for a photo session before we headed to the school gym for the event. My boyfriend, Mike, came home from his freshman year at Miami University to take me to the dance. And Phil took our friend, Jill. The whole thing was very exciting.

My journaling reads: “Homecoming in our senior year was a big event for me. Because my friend, Tatjana, was both Student Council president and homecoming queen, last-minute dance preparations were left to me as VP. Then there was the fun of choosing my dress and having Mike return from college to take me to the dance. We had such a lovely evening!”

What a loser

August 29, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

I'm so proud of Matt for all his hard work to get in shape.

I was recently looking through some photos when I noticed a few of Matt that I had taken exactly one year before, and I could not get over how different he looked! I mean, of course I know that he has lost 35 pounds in the past year. But you know how it is: things that happen slowly are harder to notice. I’ve watched Matt do all the hard work it takes to lose that much weight—taking up running, lifting weights on the opposite days and changing his diet—and I see that he’s looking great. But that doesn’t mean I remembered how much he has changed his looks, not to mention his health, with his new routine.

I decided to create a scrapbook layout to celebrate the difference Matt has made with his hard work. So I had him put on the very same outfit he was wearing the previous year and pose for me as closely as possible to the original photos. Then I arranged the comparison photos next to each other to make the differences obvious. The first and second photos show how much weight Matt has lost in his face and neck, and the third and fourth ones show the weight loss in his torso.

I’m so proud of my hubby! He would say, “Don’t make such a big deal of it; I still have more to lose.” But anyone who has tried to lose extra pounds knows that 35 pounds and a lifestyle change are a huge deal. He’s such a loser.

Product/technique notes:
I used patterned papers from the Simple Stories Awesome collection on this layout.

Promises to keep

February 1, 2012 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 3 Comments

Twisted Sketches has revealed its latest sketch, #137, and the twist is “promise.” Be sure to head over to the site to grab the sketch and see all the other design team members’ beautiful examples, then create something of your own and link it up!

Here is what I created using this great new sketch:

These random photos of my dad are from 1964, 1971, 1988 and 2003.

My father loved the English language and literature, which he studied in college so that he could teach. Although he did teach for a few years right out of college, he decided that after he and Mom married and had two children in quick succession, raising a new family on teachers’ salaries was just too difficult. So he found another career that could change their fortunes.

But Daddy was always my literature teacher. He loved to quote poetry and lines from plays. Some nights after dinner our family played a game where Phil and I would pull out the dictionary and try to find words that would stump him, but Dad’s vocabulary was exceptional, so it hardly ever happened.

My father instilled in me love for our language and awe in the effect good writing can have on our emotions, beliefs and dreams. It’s for this reason that I created this layout, and the line I used as the title comes from the following poem by Robert Frost, a favorite of Daddy’s:

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

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