The Daily Digi Playbook is brought to you by the readers who purchase THE DIGI FILES each month!  THANKS for making this possible!!

Well, all of the products that are included in THE DIGI FILES this month have been revealed, so we thought we would share our secrets with you again!  We are very excited to release the second Daily Digi Playbook as a FREE gift to you!  The Playbook is where we give you the play-by-play for many of the layouts that were featured on the site during July.  There are tutorials with screen shots for many of the techniques that were used, links to even more tutorials and resources, as well as instructions for a hybrid project and hybrid layout!  There are even some links to a couple of free gifts for you as well!

From the beginner digi scrapper all the way through advanced, there is something for everyone in the Playbook!  If you are newer and come across a play that is overwhelming, then just skip it and move on.  Chances are that down the road, as you get more practice, those more difficult techniques will become less intimidating!

In this playbook, we also included a tutorial (including screenshots) for using Emily Powers’ Photology overlays that are included in THE DIGI FILES this month.

Go ahead and download July’s Playbook, grab THE DIGI FILES,  and LET THE GAMES BEGIN!!

P.S. Shannon was the random winner selected from yesterday’s comments, here’s what she said: I really like the look of the Expectantly Yours line. And Everyday Celebrations is probably my most used kit.

Check your email Shannon, you just won $10 in product from AUDacious Designs!

Happy 4th of July to our American readers! As a gift for ALL of our readers, we have some fun word art, designed by me (Katie), for you to use on your layouts and projects. Just click on the image or on this link for your free download!

Hope you have a wonderful day!

Cindy from Skip To My Lou and I teamed up again to bring you a fun holiday project! I really enjoy working with Cindy on these little projects and I think you probably like them too.  Now, before I go on, please remember that these always come with a printable version AND layered templates, so if you aren’t in the U.S., you can customize these for any holiday you want!  I’m planning on using them for an upcoming birthday party!

In this download, we have some really fun tags for your straws, tags for some sparklers (think party favors), and a design for you to print out on goodie bags.  The bag is designed for a bag sized roughly 5”x8”, but will work on many different sizes.  Each download includes a printable PDF, jpeg, as well as a layered psd file that you can customize to your liking.

If you want some white paper bags, Cindy has some and if you order by 4pm CST, they will ship TODAY (not an affiliate link).

I hope you enjoy this little gift from Cindy and I and enjoy your holiday!!

We are starting a new feature on THE DAILY DIGI today called, Funtastic Fridays.  We will share with you great resources, tutorials, sales, freebies, and products that we’ve found in digiland.  It will be a little bit unpredictable, but it will be FUNTASTIC each time!

Today, we are sharing our secrets!!  Have you ever seen a layout here at THE DAILY DIGI and wondered how a look was achieved? We trade secrets in our team forum, but I thought maybe our readers would like that information too!  We put together a FREE e-book for you with techniques, tips, tutorials (and links to even more tutorials and resources) so you can achieve a similar look.  Shadows, masks, blending, warping, and hybrid layouts are all covered in this free 24 page guide.  Download your copy of The Daily Digi Playbook and get a play-by-play of many of the layouts you have seen on the site during June.

We sent the download links for The Daily Digi Playbook to our newsletter subscribers yesterday, if you aren’t getting our newsletters in your inbox, be sure to sign up.  We always have exciting things in the works!

PHOTOSHOP IS A BODY PART

This episode of the Paperclipping Digi Show, we have the very entertaining Pattie Knox and Amy Edwards discussing everything from why there aren’t more 8.5×11 supplies to Photoshop being a body part (and everything in-between).  Come join us for a walk down memory lane and some good laughs!!

P.S. Michelle is the random winner from yesterday’s post this is what she had to say about [ksharonk]:  This designer is new to me, but I am excited to be introduced to her by the daily digi!! I went to her store and I loved the “Commercial Use collections [notepapers 1]“. Those are great papers to journal on, I think i’ll have to head back over there and pick them up if I don’t win! Thanks for the chance. =]

Michelle won $10 in product from Karen’s store!  THANKS to everyone that commented!

We like to try and do a survey every few months to check in with our readers and see what you think.  It’s a great way to get your anonymous opinions and input to help us make sure we are on the right track!  It’s that time again and we also have this fun template for you at the end of the survey as a little bonus.

It’s a short survey with only 14 mandatory questions (the fill-in-the blanks can be skipped if you want) and will take only a few short minutes for you to take.  So, if you have ever thought to yourself, “I wish they would….” or “I really don’t like….” or even “I really like…”, now is your chance to share those thoughts with us!   We really appreciate it!

Take Our Survey

Thanks for coming back, my travel journalers. This will be our last week of big downloads. We’ll go through the rest of the daily prompts today, then next week we’ll have a wrap up.  If this is your first week, you can find links to previous lessons and downloads from the first week of class.

So let’s get started…

I love to laugh. I know when I’m not laughing, it’s because I need to take care of myself better. I’m tired, I’m depressed, and I’m not myself. I laugh daily. Loudly. From my gut. It’s required for my mental health. There is no better time to laugh than when you’re on vacation. Laugh when you shouldn’t — because something went wrong, because something so disastrous just happened that your whole trip will be affected. Laugh because your child said something so funny that you can’t help it. I use Twitter to keep track of those funny things my kids say. They know if they say it, and I laugh, it’s likely going out on Twitter just so I can have a record of what they said. My mom keeps a little journal where she’s been writing down funny things her grandkids have said over the last 16 years. What a treasure that journal is. Here’s your spot in your journal to write down what has made you laugh. Feel free to come back to this prompt throughout the trip and add to it. Funny doesn’t just happen once. It happens all the time.

Whether the weather is hot, cold, windy or calm, it will likely have affected your trip in some way at this point. Day Five will address this huge factor relating to your trip.

One of my favorite things about going to Disneyland is being able to sit outside to eat. We can’t do that back home due to the almost constant wind, and widely varying temperatures. California has gorgeous weather, with little to no wind (at least compared to back home). The weather made our trip truly memorable. By contrast, the spring break trip we took just a few months ago was downright dreary due to the weather. It was gray and rainy almost every day. The trip actually ended with us almost getting snowed in on our mountain in Missouri — for the second time in 2010.

Tell how the weather is affecting your trip. Include a printed forecast, or snap a screenshot of your computer’s weather bug for your vacation area. There are so many ways you can make this multimedia. I don’t suggest adding a snowball to your journal, though. That gets messy.

Day Six asks you to hand your journal over to someone else. I had my 10 year old daughter and 15 year old son each create an entry. You can ask your husband to dictate (because mine would never actually write, but might tell me and I can write it down), have your 3 year old draw a picture of her favorite thing you’ve done, or you can do it interview style and ask every member of your group the same two or three questions about your trip so far. Just get someone else’s view of the trip on paper.

One of the most annoying things my husband does when we’re counting down to vacation is to countdown to the end of the trip, instead of the beginning. For example, I’ll say, “Two weeks from tomorrow and we’ll be leaving for vacation.” He’ll say, “Three weeks from tomorrow we’ll be packing to come home.” Oh, it bugs me more than you can imagine. However, Day Seven’s prompt is about that moment when you start thinking about going home. In 2007, we spent 13 fabulous days at Walt Disney World. It was a magical trip, but by Day 11, we were ready to think about going home. However, before we did that, we sat on our hotel beds and made a list of everyone’s favorites — rides, meals, snacks, shows. We also listed things we had missed that we wanted to be sure not to miss on our final day. I later used that information to create layouts for my printed album. Day Seven gives you space to not only record those things, but to make notes to yourself for next trip.

Finally, Day Eight is your spot to write about the trip home. Our trip home over Spring Break was actually the most eventful we’ve ever had. We drove straight into a blizzard and there were honestly times when I would have stopped and checked into a hotel rather than battle the messy roads. Other times, my son will absolutely infuriate me by needing to stop to use the restroom a half dozen times during the five hour trip. We know where every restroom is between Branson and our house. It boggles my mind that he never has these restroom issues at the start of our trip, but only on the way home.

Before you go to bed on the night you get home, don’t forget to add the story of your trip home to your journal. You’ll forget as you get into all those things you do when you get home — unpack, laundry, back to work, etc. Do it while it’s fresh, then set your journal aside. We’ll come back to it in a week or so. For now, finish that last entry and pat yourself on the back. Job well done.

Grab the rest of your supplies here:

Kimberly Lund has been scrapbooking for a decade and has been exclusively a digital scrapbooker for six years. In the past, she was an Honorable Mention in Creating Keepsakes Hall of Fame contest, and has had her layouts published in Creating Keepsakes and Memory Makers publications. She is a mom of 3 teenagers, has been married for twenty years, and spends her days teaching early childhood special education. For the past five years she has a blog committed to documenting her family’s life at www.documentlifenow.com. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, photography, and plotting ways to avoid riding “Wildfire” on her next trip to Branson.

Today is the last day to get ALL of this for only $5!!  I know that some might believe this deal is just too good to be true….but it’s not at THE DAILY DIGI!!  THE DIGI FILES is the best deal in digi and a GREAT way to try new-to-you designers with a very low risk!  I LOVE that we get to bring you such an amazing deal each month by fabulous designers!!

Here are some great layouts that I found in our Flickr group:

We also have a fun surprise for you today!  THE MISSING DIGI FILES #13 and #14.  I skipped these numbers to help me in record keeping and a few other things, but a few of you mentioned that you would really like to have something… anything, to take those spots.  I created some templates for you to tuck neatly in-between TDF#12 and TDF#15 They are THE MINI-MISSING DIGI FILES.

We will be tweeting on Saturday (inter)National Scrapbooking Day and sharing the great deals that we see around digiland.  We will also be releasing a new issue of THE DIGI FILES that day as well!

Welcome back, my “Come Away With Me” travel journalers! I am so happy to have you here! Thank you for showing up to class on time and prepared.

This week we’re talking about planning. Hopefully, over the last week you have taken care of choosing your journal and are ready to download some prompts and get started. One thing I should mention — I’m going to “teach” this class hoping that you have an upcoming trip in mind while you put this all together. If you don’t have a trip in the planning stages, but like the idea, feel free to download the weekly prompts and put them aside for later. There’s no rush to use these prompts; it’s just easier for me to write my weekly entries if we all pretend we’re about to take off on a trip.

This week’s download includes a cover for your journal, as well as the first two prompts. As I mentioned last week, the prompts/cover are available in both .pdf and layered template form. If you’re wanting simple and easy, print out the .pdf, trim, and glue it in your journal. If you’d like to play a bit, use the layered templates. Or just save them on your computer, and read them in electronic form. It is completely up to you and what makes you comfortable.

During this week’s lesson, we’ll cover the subject of where you’re going and where you’re staying.

How do you decide where you’re going on vacation? Maybe you’re like my sister, and every year you like to visit and discover a new place. My sister and her husband alternate years choosing where to go on vacation. My sister usually chooses a theme park-type place, the next year, my brother-in-law will choose an outdoorsy, commune-with-nature type trip.

Perhaps you’re like my family, and our only question is “Is this a Disney year or a Branson year?” That question pretty much summarizes our choices. We love both, and the deciding factor is usually money. Or my son’s paralyzing fear of flying.

For us, this was a Branson year. We first visited Branson in 2001, and we didn’t really enjoy it on that first trip. Too much traffic, too many rhinestones, just not us. However, the next year we decided to give it another try, and we have made dozens of trips in the years since 2002. Our routine at this point is to go 4 times a year during a Branson year and 2-3 times during a Disney year. The difference is that when it’s a “Branson year” for us, we buy Silver Dollar City season passes. Since it’s the 50th anniversary of the theme park, as well as my 40th birthday year and the year of our 20th wedding anniversary, it just seemed like this should be our choice.

Maybe you’re really not planning an official vacation. You could be planning a “staycation.” Perhaps you’re going to visit relatives. Those are equally valid trips to journal. My memories of my childhood are peppered with “vacations” to visit my cousins in Illinois. Sticky evenings spent playing “Kick the Can” and “Ghost in the Graveyard.” Barbie cakes. Hearing the clip clop of horse and buggies going past. Those are the memories I wish I had captured back then. Capture those memories for yourself and your family.

The first prompt, titled “The Big Decisions” asks you to journal your story of how you chose your vacation destination. Along with your story, feel free to include brochures, web addresses, or photos that helped you make your decision.

The second prompt is titled “Just A Place To Lay Your Head?” and it asks you to journal how you chose where to stay. In my family, lodging is the key to a great vacation. When I look back at our trips, it’s really the place we stayed that makes a huge difference in the memories. I can’t tell you the details of any trip where we stayed in a generic motel, but ask me about the times we stayed on-property at Walt Disney World, and I can tell you all the details. My family likes to choose places with character”– log cabins are our favorite. In fact, we will spend almost a month in log cabins this year. It’s going to be pricey, but it was a deal breaker for me.

Take this opportunity to look back at your most memorable trips and where you stayed during those trips. How does that influence your decisions today? Read the prompt, journal the story, include whatever will help keep the memories.

Your assignment for this week? Complete one or both prompts. If you do a layout or take a photo of your journal entry, please link us up. I love to leave blog love. We’ll see you next week to talk about the rest of the planning process.

Kimberly Lund has been scrapbooking for a decade and has been exclusively a digital scrapbooker for six years. In the past, she was an Honorable Mention in Creating Keepsakes Hall of Fame contest, and has had her layouts published in Creating Keepsakes and Memory Makers publications. She is a mom of 3 teenagers, has been married for twenty years, and spends her days teaching early childhood special education. For the past five years she has a blog committed to documenting her family’s life at www.documentlifenow.com. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, photography, and plotting ways to avoid riding “Wildfire” on her next trip to Branson.

P.S. You can also upload any photos of projects to The Daily Digi Flickr group with the tag: “vacation journal” -be sure to use the quotes in the tag or Flickr will see it as two tags, not one.

P.S.S. Heather was the random winner chosen from the comments on yesterday’s post! Here’s what she said:  “I love the nothing but net kit. We have just finished up basketball season, my son is having a basketball party for his 7th birthday and we are huge college basketball fans. This is a perfect kit for so much of my life.”

Congratulations Heather!  You won $10 in product from Danielle Corbitt! Check your inbox!

I (Steph) am so very excited to share with you these posts by Kim over the next few weeks!  She is amazing and we are very lucky to have her here sharing her talents and fabulous project with us.  Here’s a little more about her:

Kimberly Lund has been scrapbooking for a decade and has been exclusively a digital scrapbooker for six years. In the past, she was an Honorable Mention in Creating Keepsakes Hall of Fame contest, and has had her layouts published in Creating Keepsakes and Memory Makers publications. She is a mom of 3 teenagers, has been married for twenty years, and spends her days teaching early childhood special education. For the past five years she has a blog committed to documenting her family’s life at www.documentlifenow.com. In her spare time, she enjoys reading, photography, and plotting ways to avoid riding “Wildfire” on her next trip to Branson.

I’m not much for making resolutions, mostly because I never complete them and I hate to consider myself a slacker, so it’s easier not to make any. I did, however, spend my New Year in a self-reflective mood. Instead of resolutions, I made a loose “projects I’d like to complete” list. At the top of the list was a travel journal. My family travels. A lot. I’ve made scrapbooks about those trips, but I’ve never really just made time to write the story of a trip. I thought I might want to include a photo here and there, but mostly, I’d want it to be about the story.

For those of you who don’t now me, I’m Kimberly Lund, and I originally started scrapbooking in 2000. My family was taking what I then thought would be a once in a lifetime trip to Walt Disney World, and I wanted some way to remember all those magical moments I knew we’d be having. It’s been a decade since that time, and things haven’t changed much. I’m still scrapbooking, although I switched from paper to digital in 2004. I made a conscious decision in late 2006 to just focus on telling stories, stepping away from my goals to be published in scrapbooking magazines (although, hey, you may have seen me in a Creating Keepsakes or Memory Makers back in the day). In 2009, I started designing digital scrapbook kits and giving them away monthly on my blog, Document Life.

Looking back at my original motivation to start scrapbooking, it wasn’t a once in a lifetime trip. We’ve been to Disney parks four times in the last decade, and to Branson, MO, dozens of times. In the last decade, vacation has changed from something that “might be fun” to something that is an essential part of our family life. We are always planning a trip.

After I booked and paid for our Spring Break accommodations, I knew I had better get serious about my travel journal project. From recent projects I have done, I knew that it would be crazy helpful if I had the “meat” of the journal done before we left on the trip. I spent a winter weekend writing up some journaling prompts to help myself focus on what I wanted to remember about our trip. I wanted the prompts to be fairly generic, so I could reuse them for future trips and trip journals. Somewhere along the way, I thought that maybe my fellow memory keepers would like to read about my project. Maybe even use my journal prompts. I was sharing my idea with my friend, Steph, (who coincidentally had emailed me with a vacation planning question), and she thought it would be a fun idea for a class here at The Daily Digi. I’ve been reading this site since the day it started, and I’m so excited to be sharing this project with you here.

The class: Come Away With Me, A Travel Journal Project

Course Objectives:
Students of this class will create a daily journal to take on upcoming vacations. Students will then use the journal daily during their trip to record specific aspects of their trips. Upon returning, students will not only be able to reflect on their journal experience, they’ll have a long lasting record of the trip for years to come.

Sound good? Are you in? Want more information first? Read on!

Supplies You’ll Need:

Journal
First, you’re going to need a journal. I personally like to use spiral bound journals so I can add ribbons to the binding. It’s pretty that way. Size doesn’t really matter, but if you’re going to include the printed prompts in your journal, they are sized to 5.5×8.5″ (with 5.5” on the top), so you may want to keep those dimensions in mind while you’re shopping. It’s not a requirement of the class to include the prompts in your journal, so if you find a journal you love, buy it. Make it yours.

For my own journal, I chose to go with an upcycled book. I just love the idea of taking a used book and turning it into a journal. I usually go with a Little Golden Book journal when I’m getting ready to journal, but due to the size of the prompts, I went with a Dr. Seuss type book. Two of my favorite etsy sellers who have upcycled journals are Overdue Industries and ThisHandmadeLife.

Pen
You’ll also need a good pen. Personally, I’m a blue Bic pen girl. Get something that will make you happy when you’re writing.

Printing
Finally, you may want a color printer, or a good online developer if you decide to print the prompts.

If you’re a totally digital scrapbooker, you may decide you want to do this project on your computer. That is just fine. You can make it work however you’d like. I’m a much faster typist, and sometimes I’ll type my journal entries late at night or first thing in the morning, then later grab my pen and transfer my entry to my journal. That’s OK. It’s also OK to save your journaling now, and make a layout using it later. You could even just type your journal entries in a word processing program, and print later. It’s your journal, so it can take whatever form best fits you. It’s most important to get that travel story captured.

Syllabus:

Week 1 (this week): Introduction to Come Away With Me, a travel journal project. Supply list.

Week 2 (April 16th): Before You Go (Planning Is My Favorite Part). Printable cover, prompts 1 and 2.

Week 3 (April 21st): Before You Go (Planning Is My Favorite Part), part 2. Prompts 3 and 4.

Week 4 (April 27th): Come Away With Me, part 1. Days 1, 2 and 3.

Week 5 (May 5th): Come Away with Me, part 2. Days 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Week 6 (May 12th): Footnote.

Each week, the prompts will be available as a .pdf file and as layered templates in case you want to use your own digital supplies to personalize them. You may want to start thinking about how you’ll use these prompts, and in what form you want them for your trip.

There will be no final, although I would love to see your finished journals at the end of the summer (you can always upload them to The Daily Digi Flickr group with the tag: “vacation journal” -be sure to use the quotes in the tag or Flickr will see it as two tags, not one). In the meantime, let this idea sit in your mind. I promise, this won’t be a huge commitment on your part. A few minutes spent preparing the journal, no more than 15 minutes each day while you’re on your trip. A trip souvenir that will be treasured for a lifetime. I’d love to have you come on this journey with me.

If you’re in, leave a comment and let us know. You can grab a blinkie or a button to post in your message board signatures or on your blog (please upload to your favorite image hosting site). For the next five weeks, I’ll talk you through the process of creating your physical journal, and the prompts you’ll need to put your story on paper. See you next week!

P.S. Our winner in the random drawing from the comments in yesterday’s post is, Tamara who said: I like More Than Words and Mixed Emotions. Thanks!  Tamara, you just won $10 in product from Dunia’s store, check your inbox!

P.S.S  If you have been wondering where our Basic Design Principles posts went, they will back this Friday with another guest that I am super excited to introduce to you!

I am thrilled and honored to be doing a guest post on Ali’s blog today.  In the post, you will learn a little bit more about me, learn how to create this album, and get some downloads to help you along in the creating process (including prompts and templates).

If you are stopping in here from Ali’s blog, WELCOME!  Be sure to scroll down to yesterday’s post where we have an awesome giveaway going on!  There are some other past posts that I’m sure you will find interesting no matter what kind of scrapbooking you enjoy the most!

P.S. I (Katie) plan to take on Steph’s challenge from her post on Ali’s blog and make my own mini album.  I was so excited that she is encouraging us to upload them to the flickr group with the tag “Moment”. That will make it easy for us to find your projects so we can be inspired by you as well. And you never know…we may even feature some of them here on The Daily Digi sometime! We are actually planning to do a lot more of that and by using certain tags on flickr and hashtags on twitter it will be easy to find your creations.

We would like to encourage you to use tags on flickr such as TDF15 for layouts using products from that set of Digi Files (The Digi Files 15) or use the designer’s full name as a tag when uploading a layout from a certain designer that we are featuring (such as onelittlebird).  This is not a requirement or anything, just useful for those of you that like to use the tagging feature on flickr. Remember to make your tags all one word so instead of TDF 15 being the tag, it should be TDF15.

If you follow The Daily Digi on twitter you have probably noticed the use of hashtags such as #digiscrap. This is simply a way to categorize the post and help encourage conversations on certain topics. Again, you don’t have to use these – but if you are a tweeter we hope you will consider adding hashtags such as #TDF15 to your tweets about that particular set of Digi Files (The Digi Files 15).

Watch our future posts for tips on using these types of tags. Just like in the post about using ribbons on your layouts, we will encourage those who are going to upload to the flickr group to use the tag of “ribbon” so we can find them in the group.