If you’ve heard about Project 365 or are thinking about doing it, now is a great time to start. I’m sure you have *some* photos from 2010 and many more days are ahead of you still! This year I was planning on doing a modified version of 365 where I would compile photos from each month and make a few pages, and then at the end of the year get an album printed. However when I really started looking at how much fun taking just one single picture every day could be, I decided to go for it! So I made a super clean, super simple album template for the month of January. I wanted it to be very photo-oriented because with 365 photos of different things, you don’t want too much interfering with that. Plus I like really graphic and editorial style layouts. Here is the album that I designed:
You can see that it’s really basic. It has 8 pages wth spaces for 31 photos, and then a 9th page which has one line for a caption for each photo. I am going to make a corresponding album for every month of 2010. Each will be a variation based on the season, but they will all have the same look and feel so that if you followed the project through for the whole year, you would end up with a sleek coordinating album.
You can also personalize and modify the template to your specifications by adding digital elements and patterns. I decided to make a quick video tutorial to show you just how easy it is to compile your photos from 2010. Hopefully it will inspire you to start taking pictures! If you are unfamiliar with templates, this tutorial should give you a basic understanding of how templates work in general. I used Photoshop Elements 8.0 but the same principles apply to other versions as well as full-featured Photoshop.
For all of you who are interested in learning how to digital scrapbook, Sande Krieger and Two Peas in a Bucket have a great series of video tutorals for Photoshop Elements. You can download a free 30-day trial of Photoshop Elements to get started. Check it out when you have some time.
I have the cutest little pantry in my kitchen. It is about 4.5 feet tall and has a little glass door and a nice wide ledge. Ever since I moved here, I have been wanting some fabulous and large glass canisters to put on top. I was so happy a few weeks ago, when I found these beautiful 2.5 gallon canisters at Amazon:
My birthday just happened to be this week, and I asked for three of these puppies (I put a few more on my wedding registry because I love them so much. I want to do one for Rice and one for Bread Flour).
As soon as I got them, I filled them up with flour, sugar, and rolled oats. But what I really couldn’t wait to do, was to make labels for them! Here they are looking adorable on my pantry:
The glass on these jars is a little wavy and imperfect, and I love the dark lids – they definitely have an antique feel. So I made some cute distressed labels (available for download at the end of this post). I printed and cut them out and they were super cute…
… but I really wanted them to have an older feel than just flat printed paper. So I pulled out some supplies:
> A flat clean work surface that can get wet/messy.
I printed my labels on regular bond paper. I recommend testing your distressing process on some test paper before going at the printed items. Also if you get water on an inkjet print, it will run, so if you want to get really down and dirty, print your labels with a laser printer. I didn’t worry about the ink running on the lighter parts of the design, but I did try and keep the paper away from the letters since they are so dark.
Step 1: Crinkle your labels. I recommend bigger, deeper folds and creases. As long as the paper is dry, you can be pretty rough with it. I bent and tore and creased quite a bit so that the ink would have a lot of fun detail to hold onto:
Step 2: Wet your labels. I used a wet paper towel to dab water around the edges. You definitely want the paper soaked, but not so much that it tears or bleeds into the center. You have to work fast at this point because it needs to be pretty wet for the next step. You may want to do step 2 & step 3 to one side at a time to keep your paper from drying too fast.
Step 3: Once you have a wet edge, go ahead and use the lighter ink on the wet parts. The ink should bleed as soon as it hits the water and create a “dying” effect as opposed to an “inking” effect. This will make it look aged and not just inked. After a little light inking, I applied just a tiny bit of dark inking on some of the edges:
At this point your paper will be pretty wet and your wrinkles will have disappeared, but they will come back. Just finish each label and set them aside to dry. I let mine dry about 30 minutes. Here is how they looked after I let them sit for a bit:
I love how aged they look and how stiff they feel after drying. I will definitely use this technique on more projects in the future.
If I had printed them on a laser printer, I would have made the entire label more “dyed” looking, but I’m pretty happy with how they turned out.
Attaching the labels was really easy, I used a large glue-dot in each corner. I don’t recommend this if you have a lot of people accessing your canisters, but I know its enough adhesive for my uses with the upside being that I can change them out pretty easy when I get bored of the look. You could use spray adhesive or run them through a larger xyron after they have dryed completely. If you printed on a laser printer, I imagine you could use Mod Podge, just test it on the glass first to see if it drys clear enough.
Here is a before & after shot. I really should have taken a before shot when the pantry was covered in half-empty flour and sugar bags, paper plates & food boxes.
I love how they look, how big the labels are, and just the overall vintage styling with the large black lids + the aged labels. So yummy.
You can really see the variety in the glass from this photo. I couldn’t be happier with how they turned out!
As promised, here is the label file. I did have to make it just a smidge smaller than the one I used in order to fit all the labels on one 8.5×11.
Download this label file and enjoy (for personal use only ). Please tell your friends to come visit the site and download their own labels. I would love a comment if you do download!
Each of these files are a 8.5″x11″ PDF. Use Acrobat Reader to open the file and print as many as you like! Happy project-ing!
If you are another blog or crafting site and would like to link this project to your site, please contact me. Thanks!
Today I was feeling especially motivated to organize (one of my favorite thing to do). So I finally bit the bullet and got some great clear bins at Costco. Although I live in a small apartment in San Francisco, I have 2 really nice big closets. Since moving here they have become increasingly more frightening to open. So I took a little time this evening and I went through both of my closets and organized everything that I could into bins:
The next step in my organization was to make some cute labels! My second favorite thing is to make cute labels! What a good day! So I designed these labels (Available for free download at the end of this post), printed and cut them out:
Once they were all cut out, I ran them through my xyron 250 machine. If any of you don’t know what this is — its the most amazing invention to come to paper crafting. you basically slide your paper (or buttons or ribbon anything thin enough) through the front and turn the wheel, and it comes out the back A STICKER! I’m being completely serious here. You have to see it in person, but whatever you put in, comes out with the perfect amount of adhesive adhered to the back. Get one!
Once the labels were all made into stickers, I just threw them up on the containers!
And some up-close shots:
I am so so happy to have this done. The closets look amazing and with the labels, everything now has its own little home! Hopefully this will motivate you to do a little bit of spring cleaning and organizing. Be sure to download some labels so that you can keep all your stuff straight! I’d love to hear about your organization methods and be sure to leave a comment if you do download the labels. xoxo Jen Allyson
I am sure there are some of you out there who have a big binder or recipe book full of disorganized recipe cards. I know I have been planning on organizing mine for the past 7 years. I decided a few weeks ago that I would design some cute tabs and cards and just get it done. I was talking to my friend Carina and we decided to design a few different sets and sell them as digital kits in our Two Peas in a Bucket stores.
I designed the cute bird set that you see above as well as as adorable pink and red cherry set. Here you can see all the items:
As you can see, each set has 4 tabed cards (4 with labels and 4 blank for you to customize), 1 3×5 recipe card (one with lines and one without), 1 kitchen note design, 5 large canister labels and a background pattern that you can print on the back of your items.
The first step to make the organized recipe box is to print out the background paper image for as many recipe cards and tabbed dividers as you want. Then flip the paper over in your printed and print out those tabbed dividers and recipe cards. I set all mine up in photoshop on an 8.5×11 canvas size so that I could print out 4 per paper. Once they are printed, go ahead and cut each item out. I used scissors, but a nice paper trimmer would make pretty short work of the job.
Note the background paper is now printed on the backside of my items. So adorable!
If you are pretty computer savvy, you can fill out the blank recipe cards in a photo editing program such as photoshop or photoshop elements, otherwise you can just print out the lined recipe cards and write on them by hand.
Even if you print your cards with the recipes already on them, its probably a good idea to have some extra lined cards for new recipes. Once you have all your recipes written down, go ahead and place them in your recipe box and organize! See that wasn’t so bad – and it looks so good!
This kit and other “Kitchen 1-2-3″ kits (Carina has 3 other styles for sale as well) will be available for purchase on Tuesday February 10th from Two Peas in a Bucket!
