Cross Canada Blog Hop: It's Our Choice!

Welcome to the Cross Canada Blog Hop!  If you came from Joanne's blog, you're on the right track.  If you have just hopped onto my blog, you can start here and just follow the circle until you get back.  But, if you want to follow us across Canada, please start at the beginning and join Michelle in Nova Scotia.

This month we got to choose anything we wanted!  This is a free-for-all look at all sorts of our favourite products.  I chose to focus on Studio J.  Have you played with this free to use, completely online, no download needed, program? You can go to my website to get started.  It doesn't cost you a penny until you want your layouts printed, so you can play to your hearts content, try out things and see if you like it before paying a thing.  

There are a number of different levels of artwork on Studio J.  You start with your photos, and you can choose an Express Collection or create your own custom layout.  If you choose your custom layout, you go on to choose a kit, pattern, and then kit mix.  Then you can experiment with all kinds of accessories, My Stickese, titles, journaling, and on it goes.  You can spend as little or as much time you like on this part.  Plop your layouts in the cart and Close To My Heart will print them on beautiful 12x12 photo paper and you can pop them in your existing album alongside your paper layouts.  You'll also get jpgs you can use online or for reprinting.  Here's one of my favourite recent custom layouts.  You should be able to click on it to see it larger.

Fun, right?  I chose the papers, turned some of my photos black and white, added the stitching, buttons, ribbon tree made from ribbon tabs and brads, title boxes and journaling.  It took me a while to do all those things as I played with what looked right.  Here's another custom layout.

All I added with this one was the title and my journaling in a text box that was already there.  I chose colours for the papers, and embellishments that were also already there and I was done in about 15 minutes.  

Want to know how to make one of these layouts in about 5 minutes?  At the first step, choose Express Collections.  Right now there are 6 collections of 11 two-page layouts each, with 1 layout perfect for the front and back of an album.  (But I know there are two more collections coming in February!) You can use the entire collection or just pick and choose layouts that work for you.  You simply upload your photos, change the title if needed, and add your journaling.  Done!  Love the layout, but it's not a perfect colour match?  You can change the colours of the papers to fit.  Just remember that you can't change the embellishments or rotate the pages.  Here are a few pages from the Express Collections.

Studio J is a fantastic way to catch up on those stories you really want to scrapbook, but have lost the time to do so.  I'll never give up scrapbooking with my classic supplies, but I am very grateful for this amazing program.  Again, you can check it out here.

That was a long post.  Thanks for sticking around to read it all!  It's time to hop on over Carrie's blog and see what wonderful product she chose to highlight this month.  

And stay tuned, I finished the wreath I started in my last post!  I'll have a post up in a couple of days with all  the details.

Happy Creating!