Changing Shape - Adventures in Zinnia

 

No, not about dieting! My succinct view on that is "Life is short. Eat the cake. Then go for a walk."

For many years I've worked on square layouts which I'd normally print 12" x 12". I have a good print company for that if you're in the UK. A square layout just seems to make design easy which is how it becomes traditional. It's also traditional for quilting blocks, allegedly because 12" can be divided by 2,3 4 and 6. The same principal applies with scrapbook pages as far as the eye is concerned. So there's a lot in the "pro" column for square layouts.

The downside is sheer size if you want to print them 12" x 12" and an apartment by the sea beckons soon. It will be a very small one if it's to be near the beach. Scrapbook albums will have to fit on IKEA shelves because we're not spending the entire retirement budget on having a man come round to build custom shelves. The other problem is you need a specialist and therefore expensive album with square pages.

Time to change SOME of the albums to 6 x 8 which you can tweak into A5 if you want a much cheaper album for them. I'm also looking at making Traveler's Notebook (yes, I know it should have two "l"s but that offends the Google gods) pages tweaked for A5.

Along comes the Zinnia app. This is designed for planners/journals etc but I thought I'd have a go at making scrapbook pages with it.  I'm not really into planners as such. I don't have anything to plan and stickers like "unpack groceries" make me laugh. What else are you going to do? Leave it all in the porch? Journalling, maybe. Not about how I feel because I'm British and most days "meh" covers it adequately but notes about craft projects, occasional To Do lists etc. Here's a silly To Do list I made before Christmas just playing with the app (designer credits to follow):

I don't really do To Do lists either, I just kind of muddle through... 

The week 48 page above started out as a kind of planner then morphed into a scrapbook page when I added photos and other stuff. there are loads of page templates and elements in Zinnia plus you can import pdfs and photos. Tutorials and full review soon. It's mostly easy but there are a few tricks to it.

So, what to do with this page? The 2021 album, such as it is, is square so week 48 had to be square too. I tried making an ordinary square page but whatever I did the Zinnia one seemed more interesting. Eventually, after much faffing about, I simply added it to a square page with some extra bits and pieces and background from Bella Gypsy's Woodsy Winter kit. I haven't printed it yet so we'll see if it's all legible... [Edit to say it printed reall well, you can read all the text]