It's a Holiday! Today is the birthday of footnoteMaven, editor/publisher of the award-winning Shades of the Departed Online Magazine. The Shadettes and Shades-dudes Staff Writers are pleased to present this Special Birthday Edition of the magazine as a tribute to their dear friend. Long may your tiara sparkle, fM!
When creating a scrapbook page for a dear friend, such as my dear friend fM, one must make every attempt to capture their personality as well as significant events in their lives. Of course you can't expect to capture all their significant life events or truly convey a rich personality on just one page but here are a few tricks I used in putting together my birthday tribute page to fM.
- Research. I spent hours re-reading the early blog posts on footnotemaven.com to pull photos and key words from her childhood years. She manages to write great stories without revealing much about herself so she didn't make it easy. But I persisted.
- Decide on a theme. Here again, fM didn't make this easy. She's quite a dichotomy, you see. She was born a country girl and grew up on a farm but she evolved into quite the glamour gal... one who favors Victorian fashions. Now how ya gonna combine those images??? I did it by choosing a background paper and added a border effect (with scrolls like she favors on her blog) from the digital scrapbook kit, "Vintage Farm". Then I selected frames for the photos I chose to use, antique wooden frames for her childhood pics and gold filigree frames for the Victorian years. I know, it sounds weird but it all works if you use color to unify everything.
- Create Wordles. A picture is worth a thousand words, that's true, and every picture tells a story. But sometimes you don't have the right pictures to convey the words to write the story that you want to tell. That's where Wordles come in handy. I made 2 lists of words, one for her Missouri life and one for her glamorous blogging life. I created a Wordle for each set of words and picked colors and a font that worked with the background image and both the farm and glamour lifestyle... silver, gold, pewter, bronze.
- Assemble the page. The next step is just a matter of putting the photos in the frames and placing them on the page with the Wordles. I also dropped in fM's logo from her blog and put in drop shadows on the elements and voila! One birthday tribute scrapbook page for a very dear friend.
Happy Birthday, fM! I hope you like the page. Hugs and kisses to your on your birthday and prayers for healing are on the way too!
Visit the blogs linked below to read more and feel free to join the party by posting a tribute on your blog and adding the link in the comments.
For Your Family Story, by Caroline Pointer
Geneablogie, by Craig Manson
Healing Brush, by Janine Smith
A Sense of Face, by Rebecca Fenning
Shades: Birthday Edition -- A Teacup Throne at Moultrie Creek, by Denise Olson
What's Past is Prologue, by Donna Pointkouski
Sources:
Swirly Frames from Happyscrappy
Page background, border, and wooden frames from "Vintage Farm", Studio Manu Scrapbook Graphics
Word graphics from Wordle.net
Photos: FootnoteMaven blog (www.footnotemaven.com), used without her permission (I hope she doesn't kill me for this ;-)
Birthday graphic: footonoteMaven. "Earth Day - Birthday Graphic." footnoteMaven, 22 April 2009.www.footnotemaven.com/2009/04/earth-day-birthday.html
