A Holiday Trick!

Hi Plum Dumpling fans! Nikki here with a quick tip for making the most of your template collection during the holidays! I love being able to resize templates for my non-12x12 projects, so I thought I'd show you a couple of ways I like to resize in PSE, and a bit of inspiration for resized-template projects.

First, I wanted to turn a 12x12 template into a 4x4 Thanksgiving dinner placecard. I love any project that can be printed cheaply at a 1-hour photo counter! To turn this big template little, I went to Image>Resize>Image Size and changed the dimensions to width 4 and height 4. This kept all the template's layers looking exactly the same, just smaller. (This is also a GREAT trick to make inexpensive 6x6 gift albums... just set the dimensions to 6x6 and make your pages as usual, then arrange four flattened pages on a 12x12 blank canvas to send them off to print!)

I then filled the layers with papers and elements from Pieces of Fall and Indian Summer, and used the Family Gatherings alpha to put a name at the bottom of the placecard. Keep in mind that your layer elements will be much smaller, so you may need to resize your papers as well. I love the "I'm thankful for" wordart/journaling strip, which makes these placecards interactive.... and would also make them a wonderful collection into a tiny mini thankfulness album when Thanksgiving Day is done!

For my second resizing project, I wanted to make a Christmasy card, using only a part of a template. I selected the Crop tool, and set the dimensions on it to 5x7, a standard card size. I clicked on the template and moved the crop box around until the area that I wanted to use was evenly centered in the crop box.

Once I clicked the green checkmark, all the excess of the template disappeared and I was left with a perfect Christmas-photocard-sized template. I used Modern Prairie Girl, Yesterday Today Tomorrow, a button from Black & Blue, and red berry-ish brads from The Open Road to make this merry card front.

I hope these simple tricks will inspire you to stretch your template stash, and help you to create some personalized accessories for the holiday season! Happy scrapping and happy celebrating!