Holiday Card Templates

It's the time of year again to make holiday cards. Red River Paper has contracted me again to make some fun templates for you to use to easily make your own custom Christmas Cards. I've created three designs for 2010 and I love them all. They are bright fun colors and easy to slip you own photos into an customize the text. If you've always wanted to make you own holiday cards and have them look professional...here's an easy way to do it. Just go to Red River Paper's site buy a template and some of their amazing cardstock which is pre-scored so it folds nice and neat, pop your photos into the template in photoshop, print and voila! Custom Holiday Cards. Here are the designs I created with some photos from my recent sessions in them. It took me longer to pick out which photos I wanted to put on teh cards than it did to actually create them from the template.

Holiday Blue with photos of Isla. She'll be about 8 weeks old on Christmas, a perfect Holiday gift. If she were mine. I would customize this card with her date of birth and weight in the empty white square and make it a combination birth announcement/holiday card. It's a portrait orientation card that when folded her feet would be on the back and the family photo would be on the front. Too Cute!

Holiday Red with photos of Roman, Lydia and Brian that I shot this evening. Roman is a cutie and I love photographing him. Lydia is amazing and already had her house totally decorated with real presents under the tree. I am such a slacker. All I've done it take other people's holiday photos and create three card designs ;) This one is a landscape oriented card and when you make it you have to put the photos on the back in upside down but I've taken it apart here and put the font on the top for you and the back on the bottom. I don;t want you to have to turn your computer upside down to see the back. lol.

Holiday Green with a photo of my sweet nieces I took on Thanksgiving. This is also a portrait orientation card so the photo will be on the front and the date will be on the back when it's folded.

Try them out. Each design comes in four different sizes so you can print different sized cards for everyone on your list.

Love Yourself

This week Vicki has a new kit out called Love Yourself and it's all about scrapbooking photos of well, yourself. It's a really pretty kit and I used it to scrap this photo of me that I took at the new Cowboys Stadium last year. We know I love the stars :)

If you aren't digital scrapbooking yet, you should be. Start with a photo of yourself and this kit. It's easy. Get it here.

Isla - Fort Worth Newborn Portriats

I spent Saturday morning with little Miss Isla and her amazing parents. She was born about three weeks ago and is 7 pounds of pure perfection.

Ten little fingers...

...and ten little toes.

Beautiful.

Look at this gorgeous family.

Congratulations! I hope you love your portraits.

Family Portraits

This week I got to photograph one of my favorite families. I've been taking photos of little Miss Lauren since she was a teeny tiny preemie and now she's walking. Wow! We had to make sure to get some walking into their family photos for this holiday season.

We started at their hose where mom had already decorated for the holidays and had real presents under the tree. I'm jealous! I haven't even thought about shopping yet. She has such a cute smile. I bet she's so much fun under that tree on Christmas morning!

Then we went to a park for an outdoor family photo...

 ...and the walking photos. She was super cute playing in the leaves and trying to chase all the puppies that people were walking at the park. What fun!

Thanks guys! I hope you have a wonderful Christmas!

Cowboys photos

Yesterday I photographed the Dallas Cowboys vs Detroit Lions game. The Cowboys won, I shot three quarters of football action, edited 162 photos for the Live Archive and I got an AP Top Pick. Awesome Day.

Detroit Free Press

The Beaumont Enterprise

The Deseret News

A TV Station in Arkansas

The San Jose Mercury News

The National Post

San Diego Union Tribune

The South Carolina State

Washington Post

And this random photo from a few weeks ago showed up today. Weird.

New Scrapbook Page

I never scrap photos of myself alone but a new kit by Vicki released today inspired me to scrap my old facebook profile photo. The kit is called Retro Revivial and you can get it at Scrap that Idea.

My page...love that little star flair :)

The full kit. Go get Retro Revival here.

The Future Mr. and Mrs. Gilley

This morning I spent some time with Beth and Don, A.K.A. The Future Mr. and Mrs. Gilley. We took the first part of their engagement portraits at the Elementary School in Euless where they met. No, they are not elementary school sweethearts, although they are cute enough to be, they are both teachers. Here are a few of the fun photos we took at the school.

She had a key to change the letters on the marquee :) Great idea Beth!

They met when he was pushing this cart down the hall and she jumped on for a ride. CUTE!

So of course we had to have some fun with the cart. I'm glad the principal wasn't there to stop us from running in the halls ;) I promise no one ran with scissors!

Showing off the bling!

Finally in her classroom. Love the lockers.

And this one wasn't at the school but just around the corner. The clouds were so cool we just stopped and took a quick photo. I like it!

Congratulations Beth and Don I'll post the rest of the photos a little later!

Playoffs

I photographed a high school football playoff game this evening and even though it's the first round i got my super sad dejection shot of the season. It's heartbreaking to watch these kids at the end of the game their final game of high school and if you can find the right one...well this is what you get.

I can't decide if i like the open eyes or closed eyes better. This kids was just sitting in the perfect light to make the tears streaming down his face show up. It so breaks my heart to see these kids cry but I take the photos anyway. They tell good stories.

Scrapbooking :)

I don't know if I mentioned that I was asked to join Vicki's Creative Team for a few months. Yay! She released a new digital kit today and it's really nice and she even put my page up on her blog :) You can see my page here and pages from the other designers there. I like the color palette and the alphas are amazing. I'll probably use them over and over again! I had these photos on my hard drive waiting for inspiration to scrap them and when I opened up this kit it hit me. I love when that happens :) Oh and I love steak night with my family...espacially when there is cake at the end ;)

Here's the full kit. You can get it at Plain DIgital Wrapper.

Emma!

Emma Claire has arrived and she is just perfect. I love photographing newborns. Emma is 16 days old today...she's just so tiny and wonderful. Ahhh...there's nothing better than a brand-new baby :)

Look at those big beautiful eyes!

She's super sweet.

Cuddled up in a basket and with her protector Mayer.

You know me...I have to get the rings in there somehow.

I love this one.

And this one too. Daddy's tattoo just makes this photo perfect.

This is the last one we took. Mom had these hat boxes and when we placed her in there she grabbed the edge and hung on. Wow. She's got a grip! You can't believe how strong she is! What an adorable little girl!

Welcome Emma! I hope to take photos of you again soon!

Cowboys photos

So the Cowboys fired their head coach yesterday. I didn't photograph the most recent game because it was out of town but a few places used my filers anyway. Gotta love that!

Big Cat Country

Blogging the Boys

Wedding details

This past weekend I was lucky enough to second shoot a wedding in Chicago. It was a lot of fun, the bride and groom were wonderful and the cake...well, it had pistachio filling. Normally I'm a cake purist and I don't like filling, but the sweet cake and the salty filling was such a good combination. Yum! Here are a few of my favorite details from the day.

The beautiful old church where the ceremony was held...surrounded by some cool clouds.

The flowers and lighting at both the wedding and reception were pretty amazing.

And of course the bling :) I love, love, LOVE the eternity band. I want one of those but I guess I'll have to settle for photographing them.

Cupcake Scrapbook Page

So today I was asked to help out on Vicki Parker's Creative Team for a few months. Yay! Of course that totally motivated me and I scrapped three pages tonight. I can't show you two of them yet because the kits haven't been released but the third was a page I had been working on for a while and I just hadn't finished so today I finally finished it.

If you are my friend on facebook you know how I love cake. Yes, seriously LOVE cake. So this summer Michelle and I decided we needed a cupcake adventure and we got up early and went to the bakery in search of fabulous cupcakes. You know cupcakes are just little bites of happiness, right? We found this place where they sell out before noon and it's recommended you get there when they open if you really want a cupcake. Crazy!

I used a kit called Strawberry Ice Cream by Stacey Towers because the colors in the kit reminded me of buttercream frosting. Ahhh...my favorite. She gave this kit away for free on her blog a few months ago because she's nice like that. The paper in the background is created using a cupcake photo I took and overlaid on one of her papers. The rest of the papers, alpha and elements are straight from the kit, and the font is Amanda's Hand.

Scrap that Idea!

This month at Scrap that Idea there are two cool collaboration kits. I got a chance to play with both and they were both really versatile. I love the collabs because you get a little sampling of designs from all the designed at Scrap that Idea so you can see if you like their style before you buy a whole kit. I'm actually on the Creative Team for Mel Hains but there are bits and pieces in my layouts from the other designers If you like digital scrapbooking, I definitely recommend checking these ladies out. They are pretty amazing designers check them out :Vicki, Stacey, Laramie and Mel.

Here are the two kits and my pages.
First is a kit called Family Life that is full of pinks, teals and yellows. I like it. It comes with a pretty cool multicolored cursive alpha but I really wanted a more blocky solid colored alpha for my layout so I used a font and clipped one of the papers from the kit to it instead of using the alpha in the kit. I love the versatility clipping masks offer me in my layouts. I took this photo of Brooke and Briana a few weeks ago at my Aunt's house. Love my sweet nieces!

If you like the kit go get it here it's only $4 and look at all the stuff you get!

The second kit is called Good Times and it's bolder colors and actually free with a $5 purchase. I like free! (And I like this kit...there's a really cool star paper in there I plan you use for a page in my scrapbook when I get the right photo to go with it. My favorite peices in this kit are the polka do papers, the star paper...you know me and stars, the orange bulldog clip, the pink ribbon and the green swirly glitter stamp.) If you like it you can get it here.

This is my friend Jackie's family and I had taken their photos the day before the kits came out so I made a sample page for the designers using the photos. If you Scrap 4 Hire or Scrap 4 Others you need to read the TOU's before using the kits for that. Some of the designers allow you to use their kits for that and others don't and I say always follow the TOU because you wouldn't want someone else to steal you stuff would you? But don't get me started on theft. Just because you can screen grab or right click an image on the internet doesn't mean it's yours! There's a reason photographers put their names all over the photos on their bogs and in their stores. Follow the rules and everyone is happy. I don't typically use a kit when I scrapbook for others. This is for my scrapbook though and all digital kits can be used for personal use. 

I also tried using the kit to make a sample birthday card. I've blogged about Red River paper before. I love it and they make pre-scored cards you can print on so I thought why not...instead of a 12x12 page for my scrapbook I'll try making a card with the kit. I think it turned out really good, but I did have to step out of my comfort zone. I had to design the back upside down! 

The paper they sent me to test was 7x10 inches so when the card is printed out it's 3.5x5 inches folded and when you use a kit like this it looks really professional. I don't print a lot of my scrapbook pages, I upload them to my iPhoto and put them on my iTouch or facebook and after printing this out to test the paper I really appreciate the designers talents even more. The paper detailing is amazing the the little heart on the back really looks like felt. Your computer resolution is so much lower than a actual print. When you print it. WOW! The combination of a great high resolution image, a amazing photo paper and a good printer and you have professional results in minutes. I designed this card and printed out in 20 minutes...and it's totally custom. I'd spend that long at the store trying to choose one! Digital scrapbooking kits can be used for so much more than just a scrapbook page. Think about invitations for your kids' birthday party, holiday cards, gift tags, thank you notes, recipe cards, the list is endless!