Category Archives: My Projects

Photo Birthday Card Book – template

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lighting mom's 90th birthday cake

lighting the birthday cake

Remember last week’s book of the week, “face BOOK“? Well it inspired me to take photos at my mom’s 90th birthday with the plan to put together a birthday card in the form of a book very much like “face Book”. I set up a spot at the party to take photos of all the guests. I brought a notebook for the guest to write a short message with a marker. I’ve set up a template for the book and now I just need to drop the photos in place. It is going to be a wonderful memento of my mom’s 90th birthday party.

If you would like the InDesign template for a 7×7 blurb book you can download it from my dropbox for personal use. These are fully editable templates from InDesign CS6. You can change the colors and text as you would like.

Celebrating Nine Decades Pages Template

Celebrating Nine Decades Cover Template

I’ll post a preview of the finished book soon.

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90th Birthday Slide Show – complete

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Yeah! I got the slide show done for my mom’s 90th birthday. I would have like to have played around with ProShow more but I did learn a bit more with this project. We had it playing in a loop during her party. Thank goodness that the music didn’t end up being too obnoxious. It helped that it was an instrumental without any lyrics. I hadn’t thought that through before hand, but I think I’ll do that again in a similar situation.

The slide show is about 10 minutes long.

By the way she loved the Mary Taylor book “My Grandma Mary”. We have a few tweaks to do before it will be available for general distribution.

 

90th Birthday Slide Show – in process

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I’m working on a slide show for my mom’s 90th birthday. I love the power of images and music but I forget how long it takes to sort through 90 years of photos even when they are already scanned. I’m planning to put info like who is in each photo in the metadata but I haven’t gotten that done yet. If I had a simple search would have provided me with the photos I had to work with.

I decided to show the photos in reverse order, starting with the most recent and moving back in time. For a sound track I’m planning to use “Sentimental Journey”. I hope I don’t run into any major snags. Time is running short and the power company has a planned outage tomorrow from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. I sure hope that the electricity isn’t off that long. I was so focused on the photos tonight that I was an hour late for a meeting. Opps! Hopefully I’ll have it finished by this time tomorrow.

I have to find more time in the future to do projects like this. Have you done any slide shows or videos? I’d love to see them if you are willing to share them.

My Grandma Mary Preview

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http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/invited/3390190/1d88c31e254d9e270ab390083771ed83ad7964b3?ce=blurb_ew&utm_source=widget

Fedex tracking say I’ll be getting a proof copy of the book about my great-great-grandmother, Mary Taylor tomorrow. I’m so excited to see it. I’m expecting to need to make some changes before it will be ready but this is a big milestone for me.

 

Yakira Book – last page

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I have to admit that the first month or so of raising Yakira was very difficult and I wondered if she would do better with another raiser. But she matured quickly and grew into such a wonderful dog. I’m glad I didn’t give up on her. She taught me patience which was well rewarded in the end. With her sweet nature and natural confidence Yakira will have a positive impact on many more lives as she guides Diane over the next several years.

We are proud of Yakira’s accomplishments and we are so glad that she has been apart of our lives. She has certainly lived up to her name because she is a precious girl.

 

 

Yakira Book – Yummy

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I think all labs love their food, but Yakira not only loves her food she loves her bowl too. After finishing her meal she would lick it clean to the last drop and then start scraping the bowl with her teeth. She put her top teeth on the upper edge of the bowl and open her mouth as wide as she could and scrap her teeth up the side of the bowl. It makes a sound surprisingly like fingernails on a chalk board.

 

Celebrating Nine Decades

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90th birthday invitation for my mom

My family is preparing for my mom’s 90th birthday this month, so I thought I’d share the invitation I made for the event. It looks a little funny because I’ve blacked out some of the personal information. (Too bad we have to worry about those kinds of things.) I was really happy with how it came out and the format and concept could be easily adjusted for someone else so I thought I’d share it here. By choosing one photo from each decade of her life it gave a nice progression and made it so much easier to decide which pictures to include on her invitation.

Below are links to my Dropbox and two InDesign templates that you can edit for your personal use. (Please don’t use them for commercial projects without my written permission.) The first file is the invitation placed in the center of an 8.5 x 11 page with crop lines. By cutting along these lines and folding on the edge of the invitation it creates its own envelope for mailing. I printed them on a heavy weight brochure paper.

The second file is for stickers using the “Celebrating Nine Decades” logo. By printing this file on a sheet of sticker paper and cutting out the stickers, you then have an easy and elegant way to close up the envelope. After cutting out the stickers, I used a corner rounder on the corners. This was a nice finishing touch to the project.

90th Invite with Envelope

Nine Decades stickers

To download the InDesign Templates click on the link, then right click on the strange document that loads up and click “save page as”.

Yakira Book – Yucky

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In the spring Yakira sniffed a petal from a blossom and it stuck to her nose. She knew it was there but couldn’t figure out how to get it off. I was working with Styrofoam for a project and it got all over her and Zodiac. They looked like reverse Dalmatians. At Halloween she was tolerant but unhappy about her Aunt Lisa trying costumes on her at PetCo.

 

Yakira Book – Yoyo

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One of Yakira’s most endearing traits is her wiggle. When she wags her tail her whole body gets into it. Every time Yakira meets someone she knows and loves she will wiggle from the tip of her nose all they way down to the tip of her tail. How can you not love a dog that show such joy at seeing you again. Yakira is just such a sweetie!

Yakira Book – Yowzer

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Yakira was a super cute puppy and she grew in to a beautiful dog. She got lots and lots of comments everywhere she went.

She had evaluations by two different CFRs (community field representative) from GDB and both commented on her looks and took photos to send to the breeding department to watch for her to come in for breeder evaluation. One of them said “she is well put together.”

But a breeder for Guide Dogs for the Blind must have more than just good looks. Yakira’s EKG wasn’t quite perfect and so she wasn’t picked as a breeder after all. But she is still as beautiful as they come.