{Wedding} DIY: A Trashbook of Memories, Sneak Peak!

So we got married. We had the most EPIC time. And then we had "the-incident-where-the-wedding-photographer's-dog-knocked-over-his-hard-drive-and-we-lost-all-our-wedding-photos" - which to sum up - pretty much SUCKS-DONKEY-BALLS. Anywhoo.

In lieu of a proper wedding album - The Husband and I have started making a little wedding "memory trash book" - using the few pictures and snaps that we do have and collecting together the pictures from all our friends that were there on our awesome day.

Let it be known, that husband's "DIY skills" leave much to be desired. But I totally roped him into this project because... Ahem... I'm not the only one that got married, ya know. His results actually surprised me! (But you can still totally tell which pages are "his" and which are "mine")


The great thing about making a "trash book" as opposed to a proper album is that you can include all the "bits n pieces" from your wedding day. (And if you're anything like me - there will be loads of "bits n pieces"). Above: you can see some wedding card envelopes from friends -  with wedding cards in it, with some photo booth snaps taped onto the front.


Above: Little wedding gift bags that some of our wedding gifts came in, make perfect pouches to slide in wedding cards, speeches, table numbers, name cards etc.



Making your own trash book means that you can include whatever you like in it - the arrows you see above were from the "Photo Booth Signs" that I made for our wedding photo booth.


Above: On the right hand side you can see my dad's placemat. (I will do a proper post on the placemats I made soon!). I had instructed my bridesmaids to collect ALL THE THINGS for me after the big day and they did a fantastic job. You can also see a gift tag from one of my friends Andrea.


Above: Some table numbers that were on our tables. (Collected after the big party by the bridesmaids - high five gurrrls). Right hand side: Gift wrapping for Warren's wedding gift.

My brother gave us some "wedding-themed" scrap-bookish stuff... but how did he know?!

Some of our menus from our food-tacular dinner! "A Taste of Our Love Story" (that post is actually one of my most popular blog posts to date. Right after our engagement post, this post and surprisingly this post.)

This is just a little sneak peak of what we are up to - It's really fun to have a project that we can work on together in the evenings when I force Warren to (just kidding, he loves it). I will post more pictures when we've done a little bit more on it - and I will also post a tutorial on how to make your own Memory Trash Book - So start collecting "memory-trash" now!

Does anyone have any cool ideas for how they store all their memories/treasures 

I'd love to see! Leave a comment below or hit me up on twitter or facebook!

Review & Giveaway: My Memories

Since moving to London, it's been quite handy to have a kind of "things-on-the-go" calendar for Warren and I to scribble down all our different events/drinks/meetings/activities/dinner parties etc so that straight away we can take a quick glance at the calendar and check if we are free or previously engaged. It's also really helpful in planning date nights that don't clash with anything else on the go.

We have just been using a calendar that I scribbled down on a blank A4 which is stuck up on the bedside table next to a bunch of our polaroids. It's not very beautiful, but it's stuck up with washi tape - so that makes it all ok. 

A little while ago I was contacted by My Memories  - a digital scrapbooking software company based in the States. I have always been into keeping a type of "art-journal" but I wouldn't necessarily call myself a "scrapbooker" and as far as South Africa goes, we are pretty far behind on the scrapbooking scene and even more so as far as digital-scrapbooking goes. (Did someone say dial-up?). Digital scrapbooking is a way of creating scrapbook pages that are intended to be stored/kept online. I have never really understood the point of digital-scrapbooking since I think the fun in "scrapbooking" is the tactility and playing with different textures and materials to create something new. Anyway I decided to give the My Memories Software a go  - 

Since I'm not really into digital-scrapbooking per se, the first thing I made was a replacement "on-the-go" calendar for us to print out at home and use. I have made a few calendars in the past for friends as birthday gifts - done in photoshop and making the calendar dates/days/grids from scratch (pain in the rectum). The My Memories software has a built in calendar feature where you can punch in the month  and year you want and it configures the whole thing for you. Super easy and Super quick. It's also very easy to customise the font, number alignment and colours. 

 

There are a bunch of free embellishments that come with the software ranging from ribbons and bows to stitches, buttons, brads, flowers, swirls and picture frames. You also have an option to buy more embellishments and background pages - but there are over 1500 backgrounds and 1300 embellishments that I doubt you will need any more. lol. 

The other thing I made was a little To Do list - which has also found a home near the bedside table. You can't see in the picture but the background of these pics has a swirled pattern - very pretty and all. 

It is really easy to drop in pictures in the scrapbook software and there are also quick editing features that you can apply to your pictures - giving them a fisheye look, sepia tones, black and white, sketched look, colour pops and loads more - which is really awesome for someone who wants to quick edit pics and is not too familiar with photoshop or lightroom. 

The main thing that got me excited about this software [and it's not a very conventional use - (soz about that, software co.)] but it was so easy to drop and load pics, add frames, text, shadows and crop them within the program, that it made me think how useful it would be for bloggers who want to make interesting layouts with their photo posts. There are a stack of photo-layout presets that come included with the software and all you need to do is pick one, double click the photo-block and load your pic. You can edit the pics all within the program and add a background or text to head your blogpost. I made the layout below- exported it as a .jpg and loaded it into this blog post. easy huh.

So that's my 2c on the My Memories Software suite - very simple and easy to use and actually reminded me a lot of a pretty and fun version of powerpoint. If you can switch your computer on, you can use this software. The one thing I will say is that the colours of the various embellishments and background pages are categorised according to names ie: Blue, Sea-breeze, Turquoise are all separated by the other colours with names in between - whereas for me, I think it would be more useful to have all the colour hues together in one spot. But... you be the judge of that.

 

So, I have one free software download valued at $40 to give away on indieBerries.

If you'd like to win - just click over to My Memories and let me know the name of your favourite scrapbooking kit is. Winner will be announced next Monday.

If you'd like to buy the software- you can use this code:

STMMMS18508

and get $10 off your purchase.

awesome.

Scraps

For Dom's birthday celebrations we found a little art/craft/scrapbook studio in Korea (with a lovely craft guru who speaks english). We booked a 3 hour session where we got to be in the studio and use all the supplies to make what we want. :) Here are a few snapshots from the day:

(yes, these are all stamps)

Ps. We will be doing a recycled bag/junk/pamphlet/papers DIY book project in the next week or so, so make sure you start collecting all your trash if you want to participate :) You will also need three silver binder rings.