Below are seven different challenges for National Scrapbook Day. You do not have to do all of them. I wanted to offer a variety of options so you can choose the ones that best suit you. The more you do, the better your chances of winning. You may repeat the same challenge.

You do not have to be present at the live event to participate in the challenges. I will give out some prizes during the live event to those who are present in the chat. I will award other prizes on the blog on Sunday based on the challenges below.

For each layout or project you upload to flickr, which you must base on one of the following challenges, you will be entered in a drawing for prizes. You have until the end of Saturday to upload your layouts. In the description, please tell us which challenge you used. I will choose randomly from these layouts for the final drawings.

Please do not enter layouts you completed before reading this entry. It’s okay to finish a layout or project you already started as long as you implement one of these challenges.

Challenges:

1. Create a layout or other project using a principle from any one of the Paperclipping Video Tutorials (links are at the right). Upload your layout to flickr. In the description, please share which video you used and how.

2. Recycle an item from your life by incorporating it into the design of your layout. Upload your layout to flickr and tell us what the item is in your description.

3. Begin a mini-book. Choose the photos and a theme. Gather papers, then embellishments, that reflect the theme. Put it all in a pile and photograph it. Upload your photo to flickr and in the description tell us how the products reflect the theme of the mini-book you will be putting together.

4. Words aren’t the only way to tell a story. Make a layout that uses something visual to help tell your story on a layout. Upload your layout to flickr and share with us what visual element you used on your page to communicate an idea or emotion.

5. Use your wonderful scraps. Make a layout that uses at least 3 different scraps of patterned paper. Upload the layout to flickr.

6. Design a layout in this order:
a. Choose the photos.
b. Write journaling on some scrap paper or make notes of the emotion or tone.
c. If you have more than one photo, choose a focal point photo (unless it’s a collage where all photos are equal).
d. Decide approximate photo placement. (Don’t freak out here…you’re free to change your mind at any time).
e. Based on where you think you’ll place your photo, choose paper size and pick your background paper.
f. Choose other papers with colors and/or patterns that remind you of the tone of your layout’s story.
g. Design your layout with the photos, papers, journaling, title. Tape everything down.
h. Add your embellishments last.

7. Design a layout where you cluster at least three embellishments around a title, a photo, or a line.

I will come back tomorrow with a link to the new Paperclipping Flickr Group. You can see the schedule for the three different live events here.

Paperclipping 41 - Everything is Fixable from izzyvideo on Vimeo.
Here is another free video. See what I did to fix the cover of the altered board book I worked on during Paperclipping Live.

You can watch the higher-quality version by clicking on this link.

Remember your teenage days when you ran wild through the streets, spastic and enjoying life? If only we had DSLR’s back then, we’d have some hysterical pictures.

I may not be a teen anymore, but I have an SLR and a bit of energy to go with it. Both of these went to good use last Saturday when a couple of friends, Dedra Long, Lain Ehmann (editor of Simple Scrapbooks and host of the podcast, ScrapHappy), and I spent the evening in downtown Mesa.

Fortunately I knew a few things about night photography. I’m definitely not an expert (so any advice from one will trump my own) but I do okay. Here are a few tips for your next outdoor night adventure with your camera.

Light Source

Unless you have a separate professional flash (not the one attached your camera), night photos of people are inherently imperfect. It’s a matter of deciding which type of imperfection you are most willing to accept, and that will all depend on how you’ll get your light.

There are three ways to give your camera enough light without using the flash.

1) Open the aperture all the way by lowering the f-stop to its lowest setting. The drawback is that this effects your depth of field and if you’re shooting more than on person, you’ll have one person in focus and the rest will be hazy faded background.

Because our photos were featuring three faces,plus at least one statue face, a low f-stop wasn’t an option for me. I set my f-stop for the lowest I felt I could reasonably do. The photos above were set at a 5, which is quite low for the number of subjects. Note how the second on is especially blurry.

The photo below was at an 8.

2) Another way to get more light is to lower the ISO. But the lower the ISO, the grainier the photo. Some will choose to lower the ISO all the way to 1600, allowing for the grain in order to decrease focus problems and action blurs. Below is a photo my husband took a while back. This gritty grain lends its own style and I actually like it for this “night out with friends” photo.

I decided to set the ISO for 800 while with Dedra and Lain, which allowed me to capture the colors and details of our downtown area.

3) The last way to get light is by lowering the shutter speed and this is where I chose to compromise. I used an extremely low shutter speed, which means that the shutter is open for a longer amount of time while the camera is taking pictures. It will capture any movement that happens while the shutter is open, sometimes resulting in smeared heads and trailing arms:

Whichever light option you choose, you’re compromising somewhere. If you choose to compromise on the shutter speed, ask your subjects to hold as still as possible. But remember, humans aren’t statues. We just can’t hold that still.

Night Photography Requires A Tripod

Speaking of holding still, you’ll need to set the camera on something sturdier than your hand when photographing at night. If you didn’t bring along a tripod, you’ll have to get creative:

Much of our social time happens at night and with spring here, more of that is happening outdoors. We’re so lucky these days to have options available to us, amateur photographers and scrapbookers. The more we understand our cameras, the more of life we can capture.

Lain and Dedra drooling outside one of Mesa’s best scrapbooking stores, Mystic Paper.

To celebrate our amazing hobby, we’ll have challenges and prizes on National Scrapbook Day during three different sessions of Paperclipping Live, Saturday, May 3rd.

Please join us at any of these times:

8:30 -10:30am

1:00-3:00pm

7:00-8:30pm

If you’re unsure of the time zone difference, look for your city on this website and then compare it to my city, which is Phoenix.

Remember to register for Skype (it’s free) if you’d like to call into the show to ask a question or share something cool.

I hope you’ll prepare to spend the day scrapbooking with others of the Paperclipping audience and me. During the week before our celebration, I will announce some of the challenges so you can get a head start.

I am preparing a Paperclipping Flickr Page so you will be able to upload your layouts and projects and participate in the challenges. I can’t wait to party with you!

Today’s episode for the Premium Subscribers is a great tutorial on design. It’s a concept that I use every single time I design something.

If you’d like to learn more about the premium membership so you can have access to all of the videos, click here.

Dina Wakley is an organic, artistic scrapbooker and she recently designed a project for a very unique challenge blog called, Inspired By Amelie. I adore Dina’s project and knew I had to highlight it and Dina as the featured artist and project this week. It is one of the more unique scrapbooking projects I’ve seen in a while.

What I love about Dina’s “Memory Box:”

1. The balance between strong design (the lined up boxes) and free-flowing art (the imperfect stamping and stitching, the dash of red in the backround, the fact that she stitched right over some of the memorabilia as they stick out from their perfect spaces).

2. The gathering of REAL everyday items.

3. The bold, passionate colors.

4. The childhood song, which instantly sent me back to the 1970’s and my childhood.

5. The fact that some of the items overlap, especially how part of the ephemera is hiding behind the page protector.

I had some questions for Dina regarding her project and I figured you would, too. Continue reading to learn more about it.

Interview

You are on the design team for the Inspired By Amelie blog and that’s what inspired this project. Will you tell us about that blog and what it is?
My friend Fauve started the Amelie blog out of a love for the film Amelie. She saw lots of potential for scrapping inspiration in the movie, and she invited a bunch of us to contribute to a challenge blog about it. The idea is to be inspired by the film…its spirit, its colors, its themes.

We have a challenge every month, and every month Fauve lines up a great sponsor for the prize.

What was the challenge that led to your “Memories” project?
In the film, Amelie finds a memory box behind the wall in her bathroom. The box belonged to a boy who had lived in her apartment in the 1950s. Amelie sets out to return the box to its rightful owner.

The scrapping challenge for the blog was to create a memory box of some sort.

How did you decide on the items you put in the page protector?
First I sent my kids on a hunt throughout the house…they brought me a few things (the Legos!). So those things represent my kids. The pieces of film are mine and represent my love for photography and pictures. There are a few coins there from our trip to England last year, and there’s a bit of a map from our China trip two years ago. The mini photographs are from the England trip, too.

The other elements all come from my stash of collage treasures–things that I like and that I tend to hoard, like old stamps and keys and clock faces. The verse that I stamped is from an old playground song that we used to sing as kids.

What were the general steps for putting it together?
Well, at first this challenge to create a memory box stumped me, because I’m really not good at altering 3-D things. Then I got the idea to collect elements together in a scrapbook page format instead of a box format.

I started with the sheet protector–it’s a sheet protector that holds slides, so it’s already divided up into little compartments. I found elements to go in the compartments and then I sewed around them so they wouldn’t fall out. Then I inked & stamped the cardstock, and combined it all together.

How did you attach the plastic page protector to the cardstock?
You can’t see it in the picture, but I stapled it.

What is the technique for getting that red paint look?
I laid down some metal mesh, and I sprayed over it with Terracotta Color Wash Spray Ink by Tim Holtz.

The page protector looks like it was already divided into square compartments and then you stitched more squares through it. Is that right? What size is it and who makes it?
Yep, it’s a protector to hold slides. I got it from Light Impressions.

Will you be putting this into another page protector and then into an album, or did you make it to display on its own?
Good question…I’m really not sure! I will likely find a way to incorporate it into an album.

Inspiration

I can think of so many ways to apply this. Just off the top of my head, you could use it to gather and showcase items from:
1. Vacation
2. Childhood
3. Wedding
4. Birth (yours or your children’s)
5. An ancestor or relative who has died
6. A day’s worth of errands
7. Your current hobby or passion

What could you use this idea for?

To see more of Dina’s scrapbooking and art journaling, visit her blog, Ponderings.
Thank you, Dina, for sharing your unique project with us!

For my basic scrapbook albums I vary the size of my layouts from 12×12 to 8.5×11 to 8×8. Someone recently asked me how I choose the size for each layout. While I don’t spend any more than ten seconds to decide this, there are about five factors that help me determine what I choose.

Go With The Flow

Sometimes I just feel like I want to do a certain size. Maybe I’ve done a lot of one size recently and I’m ready to do something different. There’s not always a specific reason and I like to allow my moods to dictate what I do. I don’t dwell on this decision.

Smaller Means Faster

There are days I like to spend a lot of time on a layout and other days I want to whip through it. When I am in my fast-scrapping mode, I often choose a smaller layout size, like the 8.5×11 you see below.

I also like to work with 8×8 pages when I’m scrapping from a short journaled story instead of a photo.

Saving Space and Resources

A big size determinant for me has to do with how much space I really need. If I can tell my story and showcase my photos with a smaller size, I do it. Single-photo layouts don’t need a 12×12 sheet, let alone a two-page spread.

If you watch Paperclipping Live or have seen Episode 2, Brainstorming A Layout, then you know that I like to determine my photo placement before I choose my background paper. When doing a multi-photo layout and I’m not in the mood for lots of embellishment, I’ll pack all the photos onto one 12×12.

If I do want to add lots of designs and I can crop my pictures smaller than 4×6, then I can go with a double-page 8.5×11, which is why I chose the size for the layout below. The butterfly design wouldn’t have fit with a one-page 12×12 but a two-page 12×12 would have been more than I needed.

The Paper Is Screaming For A Debut

I prefer to let my photos and stories lead my product choices, but once in a while there is paper or a product that I want to play with. This was the case for the layout at the top of this article, High Places.

While going through my paper I realized that I really didn’t like the look of the original blue design and I was tired of passing over it. It was time to do something about the paper to make it more interesting. After adding the Stickles I fell in love and then it was all about finding a photo that would work with my paper.

Filling The Gaps In My Albums

As I get close to filling an album, I will have some gaps to fill, especially the back-sides of some of the smaller pages. When that time comes I will look for photos that will work specifically with those sizes.

Allowing variety in your scrapbooking keeps the hobby fresh and exciting, just like it was when you first started. 12×12 albums allow you to put all those different sizes together.

While I gave you 5 factors that help me determine which size I choose for a given layout, there is no “right choice.” Don’t want to waste time weighing the different options. Make a quick decision and trust it.

Related Articles:
Varying The Size Of Your Layouts
Five Tips To Scrapbook Your Stories

Here are photos of the stunning mini-albums that Dedra made, which I showed in the most recent episode of Paperclipping. I’ve thrown in a few extra pages that you didn’t get to see in the video. I just can’t resist.

Dedra was recently the guest designer for a cool new challenge blog called, Creative Therapy. Since we’re all fans, I thought I’d send you over there to tell them how fabulous we think she is.

I’ll post my own layouts from the video episode a little later.

Paperclipping 39 - Stickles Experiment from izzyvideo on Vimeo.
You’re going to love all the new ideas for Stickles in today’s free episode. Dedra Long contributed many of them and I am so proud to show you more of her work alongside my own in this video. Huge thanks to Dedra.

Trust me when I say you will want to watch the higher-quality version of this episode so you can see all the shine on our projects.

I also have show notes available.

Yes, we do have a video podcast that is just about ready for release. It is a free episode available to everyone–and it’s a good one. We hope to post it tonight, so be sure to come back.

Don’t forget Paperclipping Live tomorrow night (Tuesday) at 6:30pm PST. I will be taking calls through Skype, so be sure to register at skype.com (it’s free) if you’ve had a question you wanted me to answer or have something cool to share with the Paperclipping audience. Calls may be video or audio. Contact me during the live show with my skype username, “noellhyman.”

I will also cover the front of the board book we worked on last week.

I have a backlog of emails with questions I have not answered. I’ll look through those today and will answer them either tomorrow night during Paperclipping Live, or in a blog posting later this week. If you have been waiting for a response from me, be sure to attend tomorrow night’s event or watch the recording later, just in case.