Since many of my scrappy friends are in a slump right now, I wanted to let you in on a little secret. Maybe you've thought of this already but if you haven't, here's an idea for when you are stuck. There are thousands of beautiful scrapbook templates out there and about 99.9% are not usable in MMS because they are the wrong file type and MMS does not use the layered format that programs like PSE do. So, we look at them, think "wouldn't THAT be nice" and the sigh. The amazing Barb of "Albums to Remember" came up with the great idea of Page Builders and these are quick and easy ways to get way ahead of the game on your pages and actually work in MMS (and some at Memory Mixer too if you use that program!).
But what if I see a cute template by Lindsay Jane at Gotta Pixel and I just gotta have it? Here's a quick and easy way to lift that layout. Once you start doing this, it's actually really fast and you can get a lot done in a little time! If you want to be a nice scrapper, you should probably still credit the designer when posting your page although you can say it was a scrap lift, not actually using that template (of course if the template has shapes or techniques not available in MMS, you either have to skip out on that or improvise with the next best thing in MMS to what you see on the template example). I am BY NO MEANS encouraging you to pirate other designer's work, however there is no way you would've spent money on their product anyway since it doesn't work in MMS so it's just a scrap lift, not an act of pirating. You can also do this with any photo of a layout you love that you see online!
Step one - drag and drop the preview photo of the template(s) on to your desktop.
Step two - drag and drop that photo on to your MMS page (or import it however you usually do your photos in MMS).
Step three - zoom in on the layout you want to copy and make it fill your 12x12 space (it will be a little blurry but it's a good enough guide!)
Step four - starting with the shapes/photos at the furtherest back, build shapes and photo boxes directly over the ones on the layout photo. Here's my version:
Step five - add shadows, fill the shapes with papers and use the template photo as a guide for text and embellishments!
That took me less than 10 minutes to do steps 1-4! Although, I've done more complex ones that took me a little longer to set up... Now just adding photo boxes and embellies etc - voila!
