How to Create an Awesome Holiday Gift With the 2013 Mini Calendars, Part 1: Customize Your Calendar

POSTED ON October 18, 2012 IN 2013 Mini Calendars, Memory Keeping

This past weekend over at Sweet Shoppe Designs I released my take on 2013 calendars, my 2013 5×7-inch Photo Love & Geometric Mini Calendars Digital Templates.

These sweet little bits of awesomeness are perfect for making quick, easy and inexpensive holiday gifts but in case you’re a little intimidated by the idea of making your own hybrid Christmas gifts, I’ve put together a little tutorial to show you just how easy it is to customize and print these mini calendars for all you loved ones.

In this post I’m going to walk you through designing/customizing your mini calendars and in tomorrow’s post, I’ll go over how to print your mini calendars and customize the hybrid gift pocket, as well as offer some inexpensive ideas for displaying these calendars all year long.

Ready? Let’s get to it!

First up, in case you didn’t check out my new releases this past weekend, here’s a peek at what the 2013 5×7 Photo Love Mini Calendars look like…

And here’s what the 2013 5×7 Geometric Mini Calendars look like…

Both sets of 5×7 Mini Calendars are available at Sweet Shoppe Designs and include these key items:

5×7-inch layered digital templates for customizing the background of your calendar
2013 calendars in both US (Sun to Sat) & European (Mon-Sun) versions
Customizable hybrid gift packaging and gift tag
Photo placing clusters (Geometric Mini Cal only)

My goal with these calendars was to create designs that are not only clean, classic and modern but also versatile enough that they can be dressed up or down to fit your personal design style.

The basic process for putting together these calendars is simple and outside of the optional photo clusters included in the Geometric Mini Calendars, the process is the same for both calendar sets.

You start with a layered background which you can customize by recoloring or clipping photos & digital papers to the layers, add in your calendar month of choice, embellish as desired using digital elements and then flatten and print for a finished mini calendar.

Let’s start with step 1. For my example, I’m going to be using the Geometric Mini Calendars but the steps are the same for the Photo Love Mini Calendar as well.

Step 1: Customizing Your 5×7 Mini Calendar Background

The first thing we’re going to do is customize the background of our mini calendar. This includes adding photos if you’re using the Photo Love Mini Calendar and color or paper if you’re using the Geometric Mini Calendar.

To start, open one of the layered background template files in your graphics program of choice. I’ll be using Photoshop CS3 for my example so if you’re using Photoshop Elements or another program, the steps may be a little different.

When you open the background file layer, it should look like this:

If you’ve used a layered digital scrapbooking template before, it should look familiar to you, just perhaps a little smaller, hehe. But if you’ve never used a template before, no worries! It’s really easy.

On the left of the image is the file we just opened and on the right is your Layer Palette. These shape layers represent the bits & pieces that make up your calendar. Think of them as a digital version of layered pieces of paper – they show you which layers of paper would be placed above and below each other.

In order to customize or move these shape layers, we first have to select the layer in the Layer Palette that corresponds to the the layer in the calendar. The way I like to do this is by using the Auto-Select feature of the Move Tool.

In Photoshop, with your Move Tool selected (it’s the big black pointy arrow at the top of the Tool Palette or use shortcut key V to select it), go to your toolbar at the top of the screen and set the checkbox and drop down to Auto-Select Layer, like below:

This way to select any layer, all you have to do is click on the shape you want in the calendar file and Photoshop will automatically highlight the right layer in the Layer Palette. So easy!

Now to customize the Geometric Mini Calendar you have two options:

1) You can add color to any shape layer using a Fill or Color Overlay for a clean and graphic look

2) You can clip a digital scrapbooking paper to the shape layer to get a more textured, paper scrapbooking look.

It’s really up to you depending on the look you want, but I’ll go ahead and you show how to do both. If you’re using the Photo Love Mini Calendar templates, you’re going to want to use option 2 since the process for clipping a digital paper is the same as clipping a photo.

Option 1: Add Color Using a Fill or Color Overlay Layer in Photoshop

How To Add Color Using a Color Fill

To add color to a shape layer using the Fill method, the first thing we need to do is select our shape layer. To do this, select the shape layer in your Layer Palette, position your cursor over the thumbnail of that layer and click. Your shape should now have marching ants around it like so:

Next, go to Menu Bar at the top of the screen and choose Edit>Fill (shortcut Shift+F5) to bring up the Fill panel. Choose Use: Color and select the color you’d like to use for that shape layer. Click Ok and Ok again.

To deselect the shape layer (aka remove the marching ants), use shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+D. Your shape should now be colored like so:

Just repeat these select+Fill steps for each of your remaining shape layers.

How To Add Color Using A Color Overlay Layer Style

As I mentioned if you’re using Photoshop CS+, you can also use a Color Overlay layer style to color your shape layers. This is my favorite way to color layers because it’s quick, easily customizable and I can quickly color other shape layers just by copying and pasting the Color Overlay layer style to those layers.

Here’s how you do it. Select the shape layer you want to color in the Layers Palette and click the Layer Style FX button at the bottom of the palette. Choose Color Overlay.

This will bring up the Color Overlay Layer Style Window like so:

Click on the little red box in the Layer Style window to bring up the color selector window and choose your color. By default it’s a crazy red but you can choose any color.

The nice thing about using Color Overlay is the color in your actual file changes as you select your color in the select color box so you can see how it flows with the rest of your design.

Once you have your color picked out click Ok and Ok again. Your shape layer should now be colored and have a little FX layer style marker next to it’s name in the Layers Palette like this:

Now comes the fun part…let’s say you want to color other layers in your design that same shade you just selected. All you have to do is copy the Layer Style to those layers.

To do this, right click on the FX next to the name of that layer in the Layer Palette and click Copy Layer Style.

Next select the layer you want to add the Color Overlay layer style to, right click on that layer in the Layers Palette and choose Paste Layer Style:

You now should see multiple layers with the Layer Style symbol next to them like so:

This is the great thing about Color Overlay, you can copy and paste the Color Overlay layer style to multiple layers at once, making it really quick and easy to color your calendars. Just keep in mind that if you add any other layer styles (like Drop Shadows) using style droplets you’ve purchased or saved, they will override your Color Overlay.

You can also copy and paste your layer styles by clicking on the “fx” symbol in the Layers Palette and dragging it to those layers but there’s no easy way for me to get a screenshot of that to show you, haha.

Continue adding Color Overlay layers to all your shape layers until your entire calendar background is colored.

Option 2: Clip Photos Or Digital Scrapbooking Papers to Your Calendar Background

Option 2 for customizing your Geometric or Photo Love calendar is to clip and photo or paper to the shape layer. For my example I’m going to talk about papers since I’m using the Geometric Mini Calendar but if you’re using the Photo Love Mini Calendar, just replace “paper” with “photo” and the steps are the same.

If you’ve ever used any digital scrapbooking template before you should already know how to do this but in case you don’t or you need a little refresher, here’s what you do.

To clip papers or photos to a digital scrapbooking template, we use what are called Clipping Masks. Basically the two digital layers are clipped together and the top layer is “clipped” to take on the shape of the bottom layer. This is the key thing to remember with clipping masks: the shape layer goes on the bottom and the paper or photo goes ABOVE that layer.

First open your desired paper in Photoshop and drag it onto your calendar background. If you hold down the Shift key as you’re dragging, it will automatically center your paper for you.

Next move the paper (or photo) layer ABOVE the shape layer in the Layers Palette like this:

Right click on the Paper Layer and select Create Clipping Mask. You can also hold down the Alt/Opt key while hovering your cursor over the line between the two layers but that’s a bit trickier for me to show.

Your clipped paper should now looked like this. In your Layers Palette you should see a little arrow pointing down to the shape layer – that’s how you know the layer has been clipped:

Continuing doing this for all your shape layers until you have the background of your calendar complete. Then move on to Step 2: Customizing & Adding Your 2013 Calendar.

Step 2: Customizing & Adding Your 2013 Calendar

Once you have your calendar background customized, the next step is to add the actual calendar to the calendar background page.

To do this, open up the 2013 calendar month of your choice in Photoshop. I designed each of the calendars as a layered Photoshop file to give you the maximum options for customizing the colors of the calendars. You can either leave the colors as is (which works great for the Photo Love calendar) or you can a Color Fill or Color Overlay using the directions above to change the color of the text layers.

Once you have your calendar customized the way you want, select the calendar layers, right-click and choose Merge Layers (shortcut key Cmd/Ctrl+E). Then drag your merged calendar over to the calendar background like so:

The last step is to center the mini calendar within the calendar area of the background layer. To do this, you can either eyeball it or you can use the grid in Photoshop as a guide. (Go to View>Show>Grid or use shortcut Cmd/Ctrl+’ to turn on your grid.)

Your calendar should be spaced about a .25″ inches from the bottom edge of the background design and about 0.375 inches from the left, right and bottom of the calendar area (see guides in image).

Now that we have our calendar background and calendar ready to go, it’s time for step 3.

STEP 3: Dressing Up Your Mini Calendar (if desired)

The final step of customizing your 2013 Geometric or Photo Love Mini Calendar is embellishment. If you want to keep your calendar modern and graphic, leave your calendar as is and move on to the next step.

But if you’re looking for some ways to give your calendar an extra digital scrapbooking pop, here are a few ideas from my Creative Team:

Rebecca used digital scrapbooking products to decorate her Geometric Mini Calendar:

Sherly adding some digital scrapbooking papers and elements to the Photo Love Mini Calendar for a custom look:

And Natalie used the Geometric Mini Calendar photo clusters to add photos to her Geometric Mini Calendar:

Like I mentioned before, both of these calendars are super customizable so feel free to get creative and show off your mad design skills to all your family and friends.

Well that brings me to the end of Part 1 of the How To Create An Awesome Holiday Gift With the 2013 Mini Calendars tutorial! Stay tuned because tomorrow I’ll show you how to print your mini calendars and customize your hybrid gift pocket, as well as offer some inexpensive ideas for displaying these mini calendars all year long.

As always if you have a comment or question, let me know in the comments section! I’m more than happy to help you out any way I can.

And of course, if you’d like to pick up your own copy of one of these mini calendars, you can find the 2013 5×7 Photo Love and Geometric Mini Calendars at Sweet Shoppe Designs.

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Creative Adventure #3: Steal Like An Artist with Austin Kleon

POSTED ON September 27, 2012 IN 30 Creative Adventures

I knew when I started this whole crazy 30 Creative Adventures project that one type of adventure I wanted to include was reading books. I love reading and as much as I like reading blogs and such, there’s something about a book that has the power to make me think in a different way.

Since this whole year long project is all about expanding my creativity, it seemed only fitting to kick off my first book-tastic creative adventure with a book described as a “guide to creativity in the digital age,” Steal Like An Artist: 10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative by Austin Kleon.

If you haven’t heard of Austin Kleon before, he’s an artist and writer from Austin, TX who uses a sharpie to black out bits of newspapers to create poems/art that look like this:

His book, Steal Like An Artist, started as a talk he gave at a community college that included a list of 10 things he’d wished he’d heard when he was first starting out. A list that looked like this:

I have to say I LOVED this book. Yes loved, in all caps.

What I loved most about this book was not only was it fully of inspiring thoughts on creativity but the design of the book itself, from the awesome handwritten notes to the fun doodles was totally inspiring as well.

I’m not going to get into all the juicy details of the book because we’d be here all day (and well, you should really check it out for yourself because it’s awesome) but I did want to share two of the takeaways that really resonated with me as a digital artist & designer.

1) Nothing is truly original

That’s right, that crazy brilliant idea you had? Probably been done before. But that’s ok! Because the reality is no idea is truly original and great artists know that. As Kleon points out in his book:

“A good artist understands that nothing comes from nowhere. All creative work builds on what came before. Nothing is completely original. Some people find this idea depressing, but it fills me with hope. If we’re free from the burden of trying to be completely original, we can stop trying to make something out of nothing, and we can embrace influence instead of running away from it.”

Can we say liberating?

I don’t know about you, but there have been many times as both a digital scrapbooker and designer where I’ve felt the pressure to come up with a truly unique idea. So much so that at times I wouldn’t even allow myself to browse digital galleries out of fear I might see an idea I loved and feel I couldn’t use it because someone else already had.

Which is exactly why I find this idea of embracing influence so liberating.

For the record, I’m not in the least bit talking about digital piracy or attempting to pass someone else’s work off as your own. That’s a whole different story. Give credit where credit is due. But as this graphic from the book points out, there’s a difference between good theft and bad theft:

Good theft is what great artists do. They take existing ideas and inspiration from their idols and transform those influences into a style that is unique to them by adding their own sparkle and twist. Then in turn, others take their idea, add their own special spin to it and the cycle of creativity and evolution continues.

2) Collect Good Ideas

In this high-speed, high-tech digital world we live in, we are constantly being bombarded by information and inspiring content on a daily basis and well, it can get overwhelming! So if we consider that all of our most creative work is the sum of our influences then we need to be choosy about what inspiration we let into our creativity.

Kleon points out, “You’re only going to be as good as the stuff you surround yourself with…Your job is to collect good ideas. The more good ideas you collect, the more you can choose from to be influenced by.”

Or to put it another way, keep the ideas most worth stealing.

Even Steve Jobs (with the help of Pablo Picasso) knew this to be true…

httpv://youtu.be/CW0DUg63lqU

This is exactly why I started this creative adventures project. Because I felt my circle of creative influence had grown a bit small and I wanted to push myself to seek out a wider variety of inspiration. So I loved that this point was made in the book.

In a lot of ways, as a creative artist, you need to think of yourself as curator of the digital world. You’re looking for the absolute best tidbits of inspiration that you LOVE to be inspired by. Be choosy about what you let into your world. I do this all the time with Pinterest. I’ll go through periods where I’ll pin and pin and pin and then I’ll go back later and delete the pins I don’t truly love, leaving me with just the best, most inspiring content to pull from later.

3) Make Things, Know Thyself

I’ve always believed the key to finding your own personal design style is by playing. Making stuff, pushing your creative side outside your comfort zone and taking bits and pieces of inspiration from of your idols while adding your own personal twist.

This idea of finding your style has been on my mind lately so I absolutely loved reading the way Kleon broke down stealing style from your heroes:

“Don’t just steal the style, steal the thinking behind the style. You don’t want to look like your heroes, you want to see like your heroes.”

Steal the thinking behind the style so you can learn to see like your heroes.

LOVE that.

As I said before, I really loved this book. Not only was it a quick read (you could easily read it in an afternoon!) but it was also inspired me to think a bit differently about what it means to be creative. As I mentioned before, I really only touched on a few points of the book so if this post has peeked your interest, I highly recommend you check out the book for yourself!

As always, I receive no perks for promoting this book. I’m just a happy reader sharing my love. If you want to check out Steal Like An Artist or any of Austin Kleon’s work, you can find his website here. All photos are courtesy of steallikeanartist.com.

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ABOUT THIS PROJECT

In honor of my 30th birthday, I’m challenging myself to go on 30 creative adventures before I turn 31 on 05.24.2013. This is Creative Adventure 2 of 30. You can read all the details behind this project here and find links to all my completed adventures here.

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Creative Adventure #2: Instagram

POSTED ON September 20, 2012 IN 30 Creative Adventures

Welcome to Creative Adventure #2 of 30, where I share my adventure with the hot app of the moment…Instagram!

This Instagram-themed creative adventure all started when the lovely and talented Kristin over at Sweet Shoppe Designs asked if I’d be willing to make some Instagram-inspired digital scrapbooking templates.

I’ll admit at that point I had used Instagram a few times but I didn’t really get why people were so crazy in love with it. But since I love squares and grids and had seen a lot of really cool scrapbooking layouts featuring Instagram photos, I figured designing some templates for small square photos would be a fun challenge.

So I designed these…

And then these…

But it wasn’t until I was creating a sample layout for the Insta-Love templates that my Instagram creative adventure really began.

You see, I’d designed this template with a crazy number of photos, which I LOVED…

But I was pretty sure the crazy number of photos might scare away the lovely ladies of my Team Awesome Creative Team because well, that’s a whole lot of photos to crop and edit, haha.

So I decided to brush the dust off my scrapbooking skills and create a sample layout for it myself. And because Adam and I been working on spiffying up our rental home (or Operation Home Sweet Home as I like to call it, haha) I thought it’d be fun to walk around with my iPhone and snap a bunch of photos of the progress we’d made so far.

So I put my iPhone into Airplane mode so as not to flood my Instagram feed and went around snapping photos…lots and lots of photos…until I eventually ended up with enough photos for this layout…

And it was in that moment that the I-heart-Instagram lightbulb went off.

You see, I’ve always considered myself a bit of a lazy photo editor.

While I love taking photos and love the look of a well-edited photo, photo editing has never been my favorite part of the digital scrapbooking process. It’s always been more of a means to an awesome looking end which is why I rely heavily on Totally Rad actions and Rad Lab to make the process super easy for me.

So the fact that I could snap a photo, run a fun Totally Rad-esque filter on it and, thanks to the magic of Apple’s iCloud, have the Instagram photo uploaded directly via Photo Stream into Aperture, totally rocked my lazy photo editing & organizing world.

Sure the photos may not be quite as high quality as if I’d taken them all with my DSLR (although the camera in my iPhone 4S is pretty sweet). But a layout that would have normally taken me hours to create after all the uploading, sorting and photo editing I would normally have to do, took maybe an hour thanks to the template and Instagram.

An hour people!

Which is like light-speed in my digi scrapping’ world.

Since that fateful day, my love for Instagram has continued to grow. From a creative standpoint, I love the challenge that comes with composing square photos. It forces me to think outside my rectangular photo taking box and see the world in a different way. which is exactly what I want to get out of this 30 Creative Adventures project.

But I also love seeing all the everyday bits & pieces of life people are capturing in their Instagram feeds and it’s become one of my favorite ways to share our travels and adventures with family and friends. Being a military family and living 1000s of miles away from family and friends can be a bit lonely at times so I love that thanks to modern day technology, Facebook and a little app like Instagram, I can ask for advice while shopping or share a 17-years-in-the-making accomplishment right in that very moment.

It makes my tech-lovin’ heart happy.

My Top 4 Instagram Tips

While I definitely consider myself more of an Instagram newbie than a pro, here are a few tips I picked up during my Instagram adventure:

1) If you use an iPhone and want your Instagram photos to be automatically added to your Photo Library and/or your Photo Stream, here’s what you do:

Find the Instagram app settings in the Settings app. on your phone. Set one or both of the Save to Photo Library sliders to On. I have both of mine set to On so that if I take a photo using Instagram, I get both a filtered and non-filtered version of the photo in case I want to use it differently (like on a layout) later.

The cool thing about this is if you use Apple’s Aperture or iPhoto and you enable iCloud, all of the photos from your Photo Stream (including your Instagram photos) will be added automatically into the program. No more fighting with iTunes to get the photos off your phone!

2) If you want to take a bunch of photos at once but don’t want to flood your followers’ feeds with photos, put your phone into Airplane mode before you take your photos with Instagram. The lack of internet will keep the photos from uploading automatically to your Instagram feed (you’ll be able to add your faves later) but they’ll still be saved to your Photo Library and/or Photo Stream as long as you’ve configured your Instagram app settings like I mentioned above.

3) My fave filters are Amaro, Rise, X-pro II & Valencia. I love the vintage look they add to the photos.

4) If you want to add an extra punch to your photos, try pairing Instagram with another iPhone app. Some of my favorites include the iPhone camera app, Camera+, Camera Awesome (because who doesn’t want to awesomenize their photos), TimerCam (for self-portraits) and PicFrame (for photo collages).

And of course, if you’d like to follow me on Instagram, you can find my feed here.

Well that about wraps up Creative Adventure #2! Two down, 28 adventures still to go…ooo boy, this is going to be fun.

What about you? Any other Instagram lovers out there? Anyone else slow to jump on the Instagram bandwagon like I was? Got an awesome Instagram tip of your own? Share your own Instagram adventure in the comments below!

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ABOUT THIS PROJECT

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Creative Adventure #1: Planting Succulents

POSTED ON June 19, 2012 IN 30 Creative Adventures

Welcome to Creative Adventure Number One of Thirty.

If you missed my intro post about my 30th birthday goal to complete 30 “creative adventures” before I turn 31 next May, you can read all about the details here.

I’ll admit seeing that number 30 kind of scared me at first. I mean, thirty? That’s kind of a lot. But now that I have Creative Adventure #1 under my belt I’m feeling really really excited about this birthday goal. It’s going to be awesome.

Which brings me to my first Creative Adventure…

Creative Adventure #1: Succulents

Now I know what you might be thinking…

Plants? Really??

But these aren’t just any plants. They’re succulents. Which is a whole different creative ballgame in my book.

It all started with this DIY wreath from Prudent Baby I pinned awhile back on Pinterest…

Did you have any idea succulents could have that much variety in color and texture? Because I sure didn’t.

Even though I live in the very desert-y and therefore succulent-friendly state of Texas, they aren’t actually something I see in our area very often – at least not on that small size and scale.

But given my rather large black thumb (few house plants have survived longer than a few months in our care), I knew the odds of me keeping an entire wreath of plants alive was probably slim. And well it seemed like one of those DIY projects that probably looked easier than it actually was. (Visions of plants randomly falling off came to mind.) So I chose to put it on the back burner for the time being.

But then spring arrived and this happened at our local Lowe’s…

An entire two-thirds of an aisle in the garden section (plus some standing racks) devoted entirely to succulents.

But not just any succulents, the most adorable little ones you’ve ever seen.

Every time we’d go I’d stop and admire them. I mean, how can you not? Look at this mix of color and texture:

They’re like the perfect balance of nature meets geometric shapes. Which hello, is totally right up my alley.

Even when you take color out of the equation, the variety of shape and texture of the succulents is still so cool…

I knew I had to bring some of these little babies home. So I decided to start with something simple – filling up some old Ikea pots have had since college – and came home from Lowe’s with this…

My strategy for picking succulents was essentially the same as for any designing I do. I paid attention to three key things:

Color
Size & Shape
Overall Composition (or how nicely they played together)

While in the store, I started by browsing the table and picking a few succulents I loved. Then I looked for ones that contrasted or complimented those.

In the end I brought home a good mix of both medium and small scale plants in a variety of shapes and colors that I knew would all look good together no matter how I mixed and matched them.

I also brought home this bag of succulent-friendly soil to give my plants the best chance of survival against my black thumb…

Then I started planting which was a bit of a messy affair…

But eventually I ended up with these four good-lookin’ guys:

Each pot included three different succulents – one medium succulent and two smaller plants that complimented the larger one. To get the right composition, I basically grouped all four sets of 3 together at once, moving things around until I felt like all four pots would work. Then I planted all of them.

I LOVED how they turned out. But since all this happened between my birthday and when we left for two weeks of vacation, I was a little nervous about how my new plants would do while we were gone.

But for the most part they looked pretty good once we returned.

Well except for this guy who’d had a little bit of a shrivel casualty…

And this guy who was clearly looking a bit squished in his pot…

Plus I’d picked up another awesome succulent planter at the Renegade Craft Fair which was in need of a plant.

So I headed to Lowe’s for Succulents: The Sequel.

This time I came home with these lovely fellows…(and yes apparently all my plants are male)

I went a bit more bold this time and chose a few shapes ~~that had scared me~~ I had passed over previously, as well as some colors I thought would add extra interest to the plants I already had. I especially love the coral-looking plant on the top right and the spiky aloe plant on the bottom left. Although Adam didn’t seem to agree we needed a plastic Nemo-fish to add to the coral…

I also picked up a couple of extra planters as well as some rock covering too add a little pop.

My design process was the same this time around. I grouped the plants I liked together and moved them around until I settled on a composition I liked:

And then planted them:

On this black square planter, I also added some of the small rocks. I loved the extra contrast the rocks added against the black planter.

But when I tried adding the rocks to my largest white planter I didn’t love it as much.

It looks good in the photo but in person, it felt busy and the colors of the plants didn’t seem to pop as much as they did with the dark brown soil contrasting the white pot. Like this…

So I did what any designer would do and removed the rocks from the pot…carefully because despite their tough look, the leaves fall off these plants at the drop of a hat…

And yes this was the exact moment when I was thinking Cmd+Z, Cmd+Z!

But this moment is also exactly why I chose to name this project “30 Creative Adventures” instead of 30 Creative Projects or something. Because I know there will be moments when things didn’t exactly has planned and that’s all part of the process. It’s an adventure, right?

Once I sorted out the rocks situation (which thankfully only took a few minutes), I was left with these six awesome guys who I totally LOVE…

The three white and one yellow pots are all from Ikea, the black square planter is from Lowe’s and the wooden square planter was handmade by a local artist in Austin, BDJ Craft Works. You can find a similar one in his etsy shop here.

Here’s another overhead look so you can really see the composition and mix of plants:

I really love the way this adventure has me thinking not only about how I can take more inspiration from nature, but also about different ways to mix textures, colors and shapes together. I’m excited to find a way to use these shapes as inspiration for my scrapbooking designs.

One final photo for good measure. *Sigh* I love these guys.

One down, 29 to go. I can’t wait to see where this adventure takes me.

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ABOUT THIS PROJECT

In honor of my 30th birthday, I’m challenging myself to go on 30 creative adventures before I turn 31 on 05.24.2013. This is Creative Adventure 1 of 30. You can read all the details behind this project here.

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Introducing the Plan for My 30th Birthday Year: 30 Creative Adventures

POSTED ON June 14, 2012 IN 30 Creative Adventures, Goal Setting, Project Love

As I’ve mentioned before, I love setting birthday goals. For my 28th birthday, I went with a 28 at 28 list. For 29, I chose to set 5 intentional personal goals.

But I’ve known for months before turning 30 that I wanted to do something different this year.

I mean, it’s the big 3-0, it has to be something extra awesome, right?

The last year and a half or so, I’ve been really inspired watching Elise work on her 26 Projects and 27 Materials birthday projects. (Yay for fellow birthday goal makers!) I loved that her goal was a defined challenge but with still enough flexibility to evolve throughout the year as her tastes and interests changed.

And so I’ve come up with a plan that’s definitely inspired by Elise but with my own Nettio-style twist on it. And I’m really excited about it. In fact I’ve been eagerly anticipating my birthday just so I could get started!

That’s one way to get excited about turning 30, no?

One of the things I’ve realized the last year or two is I’ve been in a bit of a rut creatively. Not necessarily uninspired to create but not exactly LOVING what I was doing either. I’d gotten to a place where I felt comfortable and as a result, started playing it a bit too safe and not pushing myself as much as I did back when I was a newbie scrapbooker.

And so I came up with this idea as a way to break me out of that rut.

Introducing 30 Creative Adventures

My goal for my 30th birthday year is to complete 30, as I’m calling them, creative adventures.

What exactly is a creative adventure, you say? Well my loose definition is this:

A creative adventure is anything that pushes me outside my comfort zone and inspires me to think about design, creativity and my world in an interesting and unique way.

As Apple would put it, I want to be inspired to think differently.

Some of these adventures will be big projects and some will be small. Some will be scrapbooking related and some will most definitely not be. Some might not be projects at all, at least in the traditional sense of the word.

But that’s exactly why I’m SO excited about this birthday goal. Because it’s an opportunity to spend a year try all those different creative or design based things that I see but never do. And I’m hoping these adventures will lead to more inspiration in my day to day life and work as well.

My goal is to have all 30 creative adventures completed before my 31st birthday on 05.24.2013 and half (15) of them completed before my half-birthday in November. Which means I need to keep on an every other week pace with a few extra ones thrown in here and there.

Update Jan 2013: Due to a little something called life (namely my grandma passing away), I’m giving myself until the end of 2013 to complete my 30 Creative Adventures. Still the same awesome goal just a little extra time.

I’m sure it won’t be easy but considering I’m already feeling way inspired about it, I’m thinking it’s 100% the right goal for this year. And of course, if you’re feeling inspired to go on a creative adventure of your own at any point, you’re more than welcome to play along!

So that’s my birthday goal plan for this next year! What about you? Could you use an extra dose of creativity like me? Are you working on any fun goals of your own right now?

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The Final Faves List of My Twenties

POSTED ON May 22, 2012 IN Life Adventures, Stuff I Love, the Faves

If you received the Nettio Designs newsletter over the weekend or saw my Sweet Shoppe Saturday blog post this week, you may have seen a little comment about this week being my “eek, I’m officially turning the big 3-0!” birthday week! Well, I’m turning 30 on Thursday, May 24th to be exact. Which means I still have a few days left before I’m officially a tech-lovin’ gal in her thirties. Eek, scary! I admit, I’m not totally sure how I feel about it just yet, haha, but hey, the show must go on, right?

So in celebration, I thought it was only fitting to spend a day or two saying goodbye to my twenties and what better way to remember birthday year 29 than with a Faves list?

After all, I’ve been creating them for half of my twenties already considering my 25 Faves at 25 was my very first Faves list ever…

And I did one for my 28 Faves at 28 list last year too…

So I figured a new 29 Faves at 29 would be a nice way to capture this last year of my twenties, so without further ado, I give you my 29 Faves at 29 layout:

Anyone else ever done an age-inspired layout to celebrate a birthday? I have to say I love looking back at these layouts because it’s so fun to see what changes (so many of the 28 ones are Colorado specific!) and what stays the same (fresh fruit and veggies – woohoo for healthy eating!).

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