Making a Template Your Own | Vol 1

Once upon a time, on my old digital scrapbooking site, I did a series of posts and tutorials about altering templates to fit your style. That blog is long gone though, so I decided I would start the series over again here! If you happened to see the old posts, a few of these might be repetitive or similar. Those posts cannot even be found though because I couldn't afford the domain and hosting when it went up and I lost everything. So sad. It was the last thing on my radar at that time, so I didn't get a chance to back up my posts. You live and learn I suppose.

I love love love working with templates when I am digital scrapbooking. I don't always because sometimes I like to start with a completely blank canvas. However, more often than not, a template is just what I need to jumpstart my page. In the olden days of digital scrapbooking, there were very few templates and template designers. The ones you had were very very basic. I never even thought much about them. Things have evolved though, and you can find a template designer for every single style of page you could imagine. Sometimes that is overwhelming or you don't know where to start. You'll be browsing galleries and see pages with templates that are fab but aren't quite "you". I am here to tell you that you can make ANY template work for your scrapbooking style..

This month I am working with Circular templates by Cornelia Designs. Each week in January I will share 1 tip as found in my page with these super fun templates!

This is my final page that I will be talking about throughout the month.

If you are familiar with my pages, you know that I am a very clustery scrapbooker. These are definitely clustery, but they use so much more of the space than I normally do! That isn't going to stop me though! My first tip for making a template your own is -- Make it whatever size normally works for you! 

This is going to be super easy but maybe something you haven't thought about before. I am going to work with the first template, in the top left corner.  I opened it up in Photoshop Elements (amazon affiliate link- I always recommend this program to start with if you are new to digital scrapbooking!) and selected ALL the layers in my layers palette as shown here (click to make larger if needed).

I then drug all the layers at the same time towards the middle to make the whole cluster smaller and centered. You can also do this for template that are smaller and you wish to make bigger. Just drag all of your layers outward towards the corners.

As you can see, the cluster is much smaller than before. It already feels more "me" and I LOVE it! At this point I can already envision that I would like to do so much better! By looking at my original page, you might be able to see some of the other changes I have made, but come back next Monday to find a more detailed walk through of one of those changes. Let me know if you have any questions about this one, or anything else in general and I will do my best to help you out! I will see you next week!!