Today’s word challenge at DigiScrappingTips.com is “Surprise”.  My sister and I gave our mother a surprise party for her 80th birthday.  It wasn’t an easy feat since we both live hundreds of miles away & haven’t lived in the same city for decades.  We managed to pull off a great Betty Boop themed, luncheon surprise party at a cute little tea room.  Everyone had a great time.  I made her a beautiful scrapbook of the party.  For this layout, I copied a portion of the Betty Boop music box that I got for her cake topper and designed all of the background paper.  It was my first attempt at designing and I love the results.

MyMemories Suite version 4 has a neat new feature called Photo Tiling.  You can spread one picture over several photo boxes to get this effect.

Here are some layouts using this feature.   Do you like this effect?  You can get the link to the video tutorial here.

Sometimes it’s hard to have multiple photos on a layout.  You arrange and rearrange trying to find that perfect combination. You may delete a few things because it’s just too “busy”.   I’ve struggled with that as well.  You want the pictures to be big enough that you can clearly see who is in them and what they may be doing.  You may even be tempted to skip embellishments because you think they’ll be a distraction.  Here are two layouts I made using the same digital stamp.  The stamp was designed by Word Art World by Jennifer for a “Year in Review” challenge.

As you can see, I used the same pictures and some of the same embellishments on both.  Both have the same orange circles and flower clusters.   For the layout on the right, I used a solid color background, no border trim and no blue circles.   There are still 12 photos but the whole layout now appears more neat and tidy.  It doesn’t seem too busy to me at all and the pictures just pop.   The background paper and extra embellies on the left detract from the pictures and just seems too messy.

In MyMemories Suite, it is easy to create a layout, change & rearrange colors, papers and embellishments.  Once you get a layout you like you can create a duplicate page, then try adding or subtracting embellies or papers to see which you prefer.  Just keep working with it until you get what you want.  You can even compare them side by side, which usually makes it super easy to decide on your preference.

I like to visit galleries and look at what other people design so I can see what I like & think about why I prefer one layout over another.  What do you think?  Do you agree or disagree?

We have a new Creative Team Blog at Touched By A Butterfly.  We will have all kinds of posts from all of the creative team.  There will be challenges, tutorials, tips, layouts and much more.  And, since Celeste is one of the most generous designers ever, there will be freebies.

Today I have a post about using Color in layouts.  So head on over & check out the new blog.   Read the post on Complementary Colors then scroll down and grab the New Year’s freebie.  Your feedback is most definitely welcome.  Enjoy!

Click on the image below to be taken directly to the new blog.