Tutorial 1.5

Sinead kindly pointed out something important (thank you!) to making your very first layout.

You find a kit you want, and either buy it or (if it's a freebie, which you can find at almost any scrapping site), and download it. Now what?

If you haven't told it otherwise, you've probably saved it to your desktop. (if you can't find it, go back as if you're going to download it again, but before you actually do, you should see in the little window where it is set up to download. Windows has the desktop as default, so that's the best place to look for it). It should look like a little zipped folder unless you have a different zip program in place (in which case either you know what you're doing or the person who installed that can help you!)

So assuming you're using the standard zip format to windows, now what?

Double-clicking on the icon should bring up a window that looks something like this.

See the "extract all files" in the top left? Click on that, and it should open up something like this.

Follow the directions (click next, then next again for it to save it in the same place as the zipped file, i.e. your desktop). It will then look like this:


If you click "finish," you will then see a new window open with all the files of the kit you have just opened.

At this point, I would recommend starting a new folder in your "my documents" folder for your scrapbooking stuff. I have a folder with all my kits, and one for all my layouts (and one for pictures I've played with....) but those two are a good start. You can then copy your new folder of "stuff" into your kit folder. As I briefly mentioned in the first tutorial, I would strongly recommend against making separate folders for the different colors/elements, because many times designers don't give each individual piece a very descriptive name, and seeing "blue-cardstock.jpg" doesn't help tell you who made it or what kit it's from. If you are interested in sorting things in this way, you can try a program like ACDSee, that organizes things without actually moving them from their folders.

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I would love to hear concerns/questions/comments. Are you able to follow my directions? Some of these things I've done so long I don't have to think about them anymore, so I forget to explain some of the steps. Help me make this more clear :)

Happy Memorial Day!