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This blog is for sharing a love of paper crafting. You can also check out my Pintrest pages. If you find the ideas here to be helpful, I'd love to hear from you. It is what helps make the time I put into this blog feel worthwhile, and always brightens my day. I love hearing your ideas too!

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Monday, August 29, 2011

Use Your Paper Features - Color Blocks


Color-blocked background papers can make help you make great scrapbook pages very easily. This dual page spread does just that.  The pictures and the journaling were all printed with narrow borders and cut to size with my paper cutter.  The color blocking sets them off nicely.  The titles were printed and cut out and added to their own block of color and I was done!

The hardest part was measuring my background paper and sizing my photos and journaling to fit.  Fortunately my photo editing software has rulers I can make visible so sizing is pretty easy.  Here's how I did it:

I started by creating a blank 300 dpi 8 1/2 x 11" page in my photo editing software (because I wanted to print my pictures to an 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of photo paper.

Next I pulled up a photo and re-sized it to 300 dpi.  Then, using the rulers as a guide, I drew out a cropping rectangle the size that I wanted for my page.  All I had to do then was crop to fit my rectangle, then copy my cropped picture onto my prepared 8 1/2 x 11" page.  If I wanted a white border around my picture, all I had to do was leave a bit of room around it.  To create a colored border, I create a colored rectangle slightly larger than my photo and make sure it is layered behind my picture.

My journaling boxes are done in a similar way, except that text boxes are placed on top of my sized-to-fit colored rectangles (of course, it takes more than one letter-sized page to fit all the photos and journaling that is needed for these two pages!)

Anyway, after my pages are all laid out, I simply print them onto photo paper, cut the photos and journaling with my paper cutter, and adhere them to my page.  My titles are cut from black & white cardstock with my Silhouette.

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