After several days over the holidays with paper stuck to my fingers and glue in my hair as I rushed to get my 3 inch stack of photos converted into my 2014 scrapbook, I decided that it was finally time to give the digital scrapbooking thing a try. I do everything else on my computer…so why not scrapbooking?! Here’s the catch though, its been decades since I’ve used photoshop and since I’m on a tight budget, I didn’t want to pay upwards of 100 bucks to give it a whirl. So I tried using Acorn, which is a similar image editing program for macs, but I realized I lacked some essential skills with that program to do everything I wanted to to do. So I put my thinking cap on and came up with the idea to try it with Microsoft Word…and I’ve been really happy with the results thus far.
Here’s how I did it!
1) Create a 12×12 custom page size (after you have it setup, you can keep selecting it each time you make a new page). Then modify the page margins so that the images could stretch all the way to the edges.
2) Find digital paper and embellishments that fit your theme – I found some great free sets and samples on the following sites:
http://www.designsbymeganturnidge.com/
http://summertimedesigns.blogspot.com/
http://www.freeprettythingsforyou.com/
http://www.persnicketyprints.com/digifreebies/
http://bestfreedigitalscrapbook.com/
http://freedigitalscrapbooking.com/
http://www.computerscrapbook.com/free-digital-scrapbooking.html
And thanks to one of my recent visitors, I wanted to share this awesome tutorial (since I still have a lot to learn about the tools, terms and tricks to digital scrapbooking): http://gottapixel.net/tutorial-directory/
3) When you drag a new image onto a page use the “wrap text” or arrange feature to bring each item to the front so that you can move it around or rotate it. You can later use the “arrange” feature to move each image up and down (over and under) other images).
4) Once you have everything the way you like it on your page, you can save (or in my case “print”) it as a PDF.
Here are few of the pages I’ve created so far.
Country Crafts 