The Fun - and The Agony - of ABC Albums

During April the My Memories Suite Facebook page organised an ABC project. You got to choose your subject and - silly me - I decided to make double pages all about cruises. Cruises over the last 15 years, I might add. It might be exhausting and expensive to go to all these destinations in one cruise.

It was great fun to do but the double layouts might have been a tad ambitious at a time when I'm supposed to be sorting out work for the new tax year. And what do you do with letters like X and Z? Well, for X I chose X-ray machine and Xenophiles (which means people who like foreign travel/foreigners) and for Z there was Zeebrugge and ZZZZ. You have to have ZZZ in an ABC album!

This is the first album I've had printed as a photobook by Photobox, who conveniently have a 20% off deal going on. It should arrive this weekend. I wonder if I've lost my edges....I like the added 3D effect you get by printing 8 x 8 and putting them in page protectors but printing is tedious and/or expensive. I haven't tried Persnickety Prints' 12 x 12 service yet. Sounds good though...

We worked out how to hook the laptop to our TV and see giant slideshows on there. Maybe that's the future!

Slideshow of the ABC of European Cruising album is below. You can click on any image or click HERE to see the gallery. Gotta love Smugmug!

Yes, you CAN use old photos!

It's a cause of HUGE regret that I was born too soon to have my entire life documented in thousands of digital photos. During my childhood photography was so expensive that we had a 24 print film which lasted two summers. Our childhood in twelve photos a year! Compare that to our Royal Wedding street party which amassed nearly 2000 photos in one day ... that scrapbook is, needless to say, a work in progress. You can see a few draft layouts HERE.

So ... it's important to me to use the old photos even if they're in poor condition. One tip I can offer is to stretch the colour balance and saturation so that they match the intense colours you want to use in your layout. It doesn't matter if it looks too stretched. You want to capture the atmosphere of the pics. You remember it was a bright sunny day on the beach and any (intelligent) person you show your album to can read the date!

I had a fabulous vacation with friends in 1978. There are very few decent photos but I was determined to make an album. You can see it below ( click on any image to go to the SmugMug gallery then click again to make it fill the screen). I'll put a list of album credits up later but you will see The Ettes' kits in evidence again - this time Some Beach Somewhere and Under The Stars. As always I've used several quickpages and added bits to them.

No Flash? You can see the gallery HERE.

Just Had To Add To It!

Scroll down a few posts and you'll see a back view of me in a swimsuit. Eeek.... it's the layout called Fish Gotta Swim. It's still called that but I couldn't resist tweaking it a little and basically throwing more stuff at it. Here's the revised version:



I love the whale and the fish from The Ettes' Some Beach Somewhere. They have featured in a few layouts lately. Most elements are from Bella Gypsy's Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny.