A Very Special Sweet Shoppe Sunday

POSTED ON April 8, 2012 IN Announcements

Happy Easter Sunday everyone! Hope you’re enjoying a day full of of fun and of course, candy! We’re over here recovering from our Easter breakfast food coma but I wanted to pop in here real quick to give you a look at the final day of the Sweet Shoppe Designs New Designer Debut weekend.

Over the next several weeks, I’ll be adding products over at the Sweet Shoppe but to get things started, each new designer is releasing 5 classic products into the Sweet Shoppe today.

Here’s what I have releasing:

Want to see these classics in action? Here ya go…

As with all the products from this weekend, these classic releases are 25% off through tonight, April 8th so if you want to pick them up and save, make sure you hop over there today.

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My Very First Sweet Shoppe Saturday!

POSTED ON April 7, 2012 IN Announcements

Happy Sweet Shoppe Saturday everyone! I can’t even tell you how excited I am that this day has finally come! It feels like I’ve been waiting forever to put my first new releases up into the Sweet Shoppe Designs store and now here we are!

I’m sure you’re not really wanting to listen to me ramble so let’s get to the good stuff, shall we? Here’s a look at my two new digital scrapbooking template packs releasing this weekend:

Geometric Vol. 1

Designed with all my fellow geometry lover’s in mind, Geometric Vol. 1 features 3 brand-new 12×12-inch digital scrapbooking templates based around one of my favorite things – shapes!

Block Party Vol. 1

Calling all square-lovin’ digital scrapbookers, Block Party Vol. 1 is for you! Designed in my signature clean and modern blocked style, this digital scrapbooking template pack will have you creating wow-worthy layouts of your favorite life adventures and memories in no time.

Team Awesome Inspiration

Of course, what would a Sweet Shoppe Saturday release be without some Nettio Designs Team Awesome inspiration?

Both Geometric Vol. 1 and Block Party Vol. 1 are 25% off through Sunday, April 8th as part of the Sweet Shoppe Designs New Designer Debut Weekend so pick them up this weekend and save!

I’ll be back tomorrow with my final reveal of this weekend’s 3-day extravaganza. In the meantime, happy scrapping!

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Sweet Shoppe Designs New Designer Debut Weekend is Here!

POSTED ON April 6, 2012 IN Announcements

Hello hello everyone! Did you miss me this week?

I can tell you one thing that didn’t miss me this week – my computer! Because I have been attached to my compy all week long in preparation for my first official weekend as a Sweet Shoppe Designer! Which means I’ve got not 1, not 2, but 8! products releasing over the course of this weekend. Excited yet?

Before we get into what I’ve got for you, let me tell you a bit more about the details for this weekend’s event over at Sweet Shoppe Designs.

To kick things off right for all six of our new designers, we’re partying it up with a weekend-long product release extravaganza. Let me tell, you are not going to want to miss out on the products this weekend because seriously, they are AMAZING!

And best of all, you’ll be able to save 25% on all the new releases ALL weekend long.

Sounds like a scrap-tastic party, right?

Petit Four Friday

The weekend event kicks off today with six new Petit Four collaborations being released into the Sweet Shoppe. I teamed up with the lovely Cindy, Darcy and Janet to bring you Potpourri, which includes four brand new templates in each of our signature styles as well as an adorable new font from Darcy and Janet.

The Petit Fours are only available limited edition through April 30th so be sure to stop by the Sweet Shoppe and check them out before the month is over and they head into the Sweet Shoppe vault.

Sneak Peek Friday

Tomorrow is Sweet Shoppe Saturday which means new releases from both the veterans and all six new designers will be hitting the Shoppe. Eeek, hard to believe the day is finally here! So exciting!

You’ll have to wait until tomorrow to pick up my two two brand-new template packs but since Fridays are for peeks at the Sweet Shoppe, here’s an official sneak peek of my two new products:

Of course if you want to check out sneak peeks from ALL of our designers, as well as lots and lots of eye candy layouts from all of our creative teams, be sure to check out the official Sneak Peek thread in the Sweet Shoppe Forums.

Well, that’s all I’ve got for you for today but you’ll be seeing me again tomorrow as this New Designer Debut Easter Weekend Egg-stravaganza (you had to know that was coming, right? haha) rolls on!

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Tips & Tricks from Team Awesome: Jennifer

POSTED ON March 15, 2012 IN Tips from Team Awesome

Editor’s Note: Happy Thursday everyone! Welcome to the first ever installment of Tips & Tricks from Team Awesome, where the amazingly talented ladies from my Creative Team will be sharing how they use NettioDesigns templates to embrace their scrapbooking awesomeness. Our first brave soul is Jennifer so if you like her post and want to see more posts like this in the future, be sure to leave her some love in the comments!

Hi Everyone!

Lynnette asked me to post today on how I take her awesome templates, and put my own spin on them.

One of the reasons Lynnette’s templates work so great for me is that I love yearlong projects. One of my projects this year is to do a monthly He & She layout, based on the idea by Elise Blaha. I try to use a different template every month to make this project a lot of fun, and for my February layout I have chosen to use a template from the It’s Goal-tastic Template set.

I’ve chosen to use Penny Springmann’s This Life series for my layouts, and will be using the February Edition for this particular layout. The first thing I do when I start a layout is turn off all text and element layers and start playing with the papers I want to use. I start by placing my patterns, then filling in with solids to add contrast.

Once I have all my papers in place, I start turning back on the element layers. I look at which elements I want to use, and how I want to change things. I knew I wanted to include some photos, so I chose to remove the buttons and swap them out for photos. I wanted to focus on the story, and decided to remove the paper strips from the inset blocks as well to help clean things up.

This left me with a few basic elements placed, and space for four photos. Now it was time to fill those spaces and add any additional elements I felt were needed.

Once the elements and photos are in place, it’s time to add journaling and a title. I wanted to keep things really simple, and just played with alphas to ensure that. Then I take a look at the page and start tweaking. After I’ve completed this much, I know I need to change my papers a bit to make things work. I tweak little things until it sits right. Then, it’s time to save and walk away.

I’m really happy with how this page turned out. I don’t take notes throughout the month on what happened, but I pull photos from our phones to see just what we did in the last month, and it’s been a fun way to capture snippets of our lives.

If I have any tips to share with you guys for embracing your own awesomeness, it would be these three things:

Perfection is highly overrated. Just enjoy the page, use what photos you have, and tell your story. In 10 years you won’t care that the photos aren’t perfect, just that you have the story told.
Phoneography is fun. I love my nice camera, but it’s so much easier to just use my phone camera. Most cell phone cameras are pretty good these days, and can make for some fun photos to scrap. Add a filter, change it to black and white, crop it, just do whatever it takes to embrace those photos.
Scrap for YOU. Don’t spend time worrying about if you are doing things right, or if someone else will like it. Tell your story, your way. You are awesome, and don’t doubt that.

Happy Scrapbooking Everyone!

Jennifer

Thanks so much Jennifer! Awesome tips!

Psst…Is your computer in need of a spring cleaning? Then you won’t want to miss what we’ve got coming for you next week! The fun begins Monday morning so be sure to stop by!

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Counting Down My Top 5 Faves From NettioDesigns’ First Year

POSTED ON February 28, 2012 IN 1st Anniversary, Announcements, the Faves

With the NettioDesigns 1st Anniversary celebration coming to an end this week, I wanted to spend today sharing some of my favorite NettioDesigns related-moments from the past year. I have to say, going back through my blog archives was a fun reminder of just how much I have done this past year, so I hope you enjoy this trip down memory lane!

Fave #1: Opening Day of NettioDesigns

I don’t think any faves list for the past year would be complete without starting at the very beginning: February 16th, 2011, NettioDesigns’ official grand opening day. The circumstances surrounding the grand opening were well, crazy.

In the midst of getting everything ready for the shoppe opening, I’d also volunteered to help my little sister drive back from Florida to California (I was on call for the Florida to Texas leg). Which meant behind the scenes, not only was I furiously working to create new product and get the shoppe up and running, but I was also driving long days and dealing with some of the craziest weather I’ve ever encountered – 30 degree weather in Florida, tornados and crazy rain in the South and snow and ice in Texas.

In the end, it simply wasn’t possible to get everything done in time and I had to postpone the grand opening by a week. But all the waiting and hard work proved to be worth it because I’ll never forget the sense of pride I felt in seeing those first sales come through and realizing that hey, maybe this crazy idea of mine may just actually work.

Fave #2 – Blog-tastic Events

Two of my favorite blog-related moments from the past year would have to be the Great Computer Spring Clean-a-thon I did last March and my 5th Scrap-i-versary celebration last April. In both cases, I came up with this idea for a week-long series of posts for the blog and while things didn’t always go exactly as I planned, the posts from both of those series are still some of my favorites. There’s a quirky honesty and joy to those posts that feels 100% me. I may even have giggled a time or two as I read through them all again, hehe.

Fave #3 – A Week In the Life 2011

It’s hard to deny that my A Week In the Life photo book wasn’t a bit of turning point for my this little website of mine. It got me noticed by a larger audience and as a result, opened doors for some fun opportunities that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise. The icing on the cake? It’s still my absolute favorite scrapbooking project from 2011.

Fave #4 – Teaching at Masterful Scrapbook Design

Teaching has always been something I’ve wanted to do as part of NettioDesigns but I’ll admit the large upfront time cost compared to creating a set of digital scrapbooking templates kind of scared me. So when the lovely Debbie Hodge asked me if I would be interested in guest teaching at Masterful Scrapbooking Design, I jumped at the chance. And I have to say, I loved it. Not only did it make me realize just how much I love chatting about the process and design side of scrapbooking, but it was a nice little reminder that maybe my goals and dreams aren’t as so out there after all. (And yes, the fact that I taught a class alongside one of my fave paper scrappers, Kelly Purkey, totally boggles my mind.)

Fave #5 – The Faves 2011

If there was one product line for NettioDesigns that represents year 1 it would have to be my Monthly Faves and Holiday Faves Mini Album templates. But the reason the Faves makes this list is not so much for the Faves themselves but because they represent the heart behind NettioDesigns – the importance of taking time to document and celebrate your awesomeness in a fun and unique way.

The Faves are what pushed me to begin this crazy adventure in the first place and so it seems only fitting to end the 1st anniversary with my final installment of the Faves template series, FAVE-O-RITES Vol 5: Sept, Oct, Nov & Dec Faves.

These templates are up in the NettioDesigns Shoppe now and like everything in the shoppe are 20% off (30% off if you’re a subscriber!) through the end of February in honor of the 1st Anniversary Celebration. Go check them out here!

And of course my final fave on this list would have to be getting to chat with all of you. Like most bloggers there are definitely days when it feels a bit like I’m rambling to myself, but those moments when someone shares a layout or leaves a comment and totally gets it makes this crazy adventure all worth it. So at the risk of being mushy for a sec, I hope you know just how much it means to me when you take time out of your busy day to stop by and share your thoughts and layouts with little ol’ me.

So with that, that wraps up my 5 Faves from the 1st year of NettioDesigns! I’ll be back tomorrow with my final 1st Anniversary post and to announce the winners of the Show Off Your Awesomeness Contest. In meantime, if you’ve been eyeing something in the shoppe, make sure to pick it up before the anniversary sale ends tomorrow!

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How To Use the Photo Book Frenzy Templates to Create Your Own Photo Book (Video Tutorial)

POSTED ON February 24, 2012 IN 1st Anniversary

Since releasing the Photo Book Frenzy: A Week In the Life templates last week, I’ve received some questions about how exactly they work and how you can use them to put together your own photo book.

So in an effort to offer some clarity, I’ve put together a two-part video tutorial showing you just how easy it is to use these templates to create your own photo book.

I’ve been wanting to create some video tutorials for quite some time but I’ll admit, the thought of having to listen to my own voice on a recording kind of scared me – what if I sounded crazy?! – but it turned out to be really fun!

But before we get to the videos, I wanted to answer a couple of the questions I’ve been frequently asked about these templates:

1) What size are the actual templates?

The Photo Book Frenzy: AWITL 8×10 templates are 10 inches tall by 16 inches wide. This represents two 8×10 pages side-by-side in a single spread, just like you see when you look at any book. The Photo Book Frenzy: AWITL 12×12 templates are 12 inches high by 24 inches wide – two 12×12 pages side by side.

This makes it easy to give your two pages a cohesive look but you will need to crop each template into two individual pages for printing which I show you how to do in Part 2 of the video.

2) Is your A Week In the Life album cover design included with the templates?

As of right now, no. My concern with including a template based on the cover of my album was that unlike with the individual pages, the sizing of an image-wrapped cover depends on a lot of different variables – type of paper, thickness of book, number of pages, etc., and because of the grid-based design of the cover and the spine text, it’s not quite as easy to adjust as the pages.

But I may do some more research into this and if I can figure an easy way to include it, I’ll be sure to send an update to anyone who has purchased the templates.

UPDATE 5/01/12: Happy Day! Both the Photo Book Frenzy templates have been updated to include cover templates for creating a front and back cover for your book.

3) Can these templates be resized for say 8×8, 10×10 or 6×12?

Yes. In the case of a square-size like 8×8 or 10×10, your best bet is to pick up the Photo Book Frenzy: AWITL 12×12 templates and size them down as the proportions will remain the same. Resizing for 6×12 is a little more complicated as you’d have to adjust the photos and journaling individually but it can be done with a little effort.

In Part 2 of the video tutorial, I’ll show you how to adjust the template to fit the specifications of your photo book printer as well.

Ok, now onto the videos!

In Part 1 of the tutorial, I show you how to resize the template to fit the exact size of your photo book and how to design your page using the template and clipping masks. In Part 2 of the tutorial, I show you how to crop your pages for printing and then upload them to Blurb using Blurb’s online Bookify tool.