Template Talk

I have several sets of templates returning to my shop this week - some of my favorites.  And it occurred to me that it might be interesting for you to have an idea of why I make templates the way that I do, and some of the things you can do with them. 




I'll preface all of this by saying that I started making templates for myself and my scrapping style.  It's no secret that scrapping is my first love, and I do scrap with my designs - maybe it's more accurate to say that I design for my scrapping, LOL!  And I found that while I liked using a template sometimes, I had no patience for a lot of element placement - to me that's the fun part and so I would delete all the elements first thing.  Which left photos.  And often I was only starting with a two or three photo template so it always seemed like I was duplicating photo spots and then figuring out where to add them in.  You might be thinking to yourself, why use a template at all?  That thought did eventually occur to me LOL.  But the thing is, I like to scrap with several photos because I seem to think I need to use most of the decent (used very loosely in this instance) photos that I take because they all portray some detail I wanted to capture and remember.  And my idea of decent is a little iffy - not very many can hold up to much scrutiny if they are large and in charge on my page ;)  Finally, I decided to start with a blank slate and make my own sort of template - photo placement being prominent.  That was when my photo cluster line originated.  Sometimes I like to mimic the look of my mother's old photo albums, with the white-edged photos.  Sometimes I prefer a cleaner look without the edges.  Sometimes I want to put a narrow frame around the photo to help my eye make sense of the layout.  So my photo clusters have "photoedges" for each photo spot that can be left in place, turned off, or have a paper clipped to them and a shadow added for a framing effect.



Note that the "Taped" clusters can be moved wherever you like on your page.  (Thanks to Karen Robinson for the Trick or Treat layout, and Dawn Inskip for the owl example)


And in this one, I used one of the mini clusters at the top, and then a blended photo on the main page.  This is also a good way to disguise a less-than-picture-perfect photo LOL.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas, in case this sort of tool is something you'd like to have in YOUR scrapping stash.  I love that I can re-use them and have a completely different look every time  :)

Big Picture 3 and the entire set of Taped Photo Clusters (available separately or in the bundle) will be at the introductory sale price through Monday in my Digichick shop.  Happy Scrapping!


Julie