Family History Book made with Serif Craft Artist Final Part

Hello everyone

Today's post is to share the last of the pages from my family history book, so I will begin where I left off yesterday.  So far all the pages I have shown have related to my grandfather's ancestors and descendents, but of course we are also descended from my grandmother's family and in this section of my book I go back up the generations on that side of  my family.  I finished my post yesterday at page 23 so today I will begin with page 24.

My great grandfather was a tailor and before their marriage my great grandmother was a dressmaker, but when my grandmother was a young woman, the family also had a couple of sweet shops.  The pins, needle and thread and the sweets were from Daisytrail digikits and I downloaded the tape measure from the internet and then cut it out using the Cutout studio.  The background and the central panel were both from digikits (I think!) and then I added the two sets of digital stitching using the brush facility in Craft Artist.

My greatgrandparents had twelve children so pages 25,26,27 and 28 are in exactly the same format as pages 8,9 and 10 with the addition of needlework or sweet embellishments, so I won't show them here.  The next page I am going to share is page 29

The background on this page was made using one of my craft cds and the frames are from a Daisytrail digikit, and I changed the colour of them.  This was a quick and easy page to make, once I had played around with the photographs to try and enhance the quality of them, and dithered endlessly about which style of photframe to use!  This is another of my favourite pages.

Pages 30,31,32 and 33 were a combination of photos and facts - as this stage I was worrying about the length of the book so tried to condense as much as possible.

I didn't have a photograph of my great grandmother so used a crafty elegant lady instead!

Again I made my own backgrounds using old photos, maps and documents.  As these ancestors were dyers and bleachers I just couldn't resist adding in a few sheep from a digikit.

My final page I actually started in November, before I broke my wrist, and posted it to my blog as it was at that time, so some of you may recognise it.

For the background on this page I used old military documents and postcards from the Falkland Islands which related to the Falklands Campaign, reduced the opacity of them, overlaid the Union flag reducing the opacity of that too and then did the export as image trick.  I added the topper I made in November using a Joanna Sheen image and then added the only three photographs I have of those who died.  As luck would have it there is one from WW1, one from WW2 and one from the Falklands Campaign.  I then downloaded images of the three appropriate medals from the internet, cut them out from their backgrounds using Cutout studio and added them.  I also used the page curl facility in the Photolab bit of Craft Artist on the photographs and added the pins from a digikit.  And this is another of my favourite pages.

I printed out all the 8x8 pages and made five books but as I don't have a wide format printer I had to send the 12x12 pages off to be printed.  I sent them off to DS Colour Labs in Manchester and I think they deserve a mention here because they were quick and efficient and the finished prints were of an excellent standard.  They were also the cheapest of all the places I looked at and I would recommend them to anyone wanting 12x12 prints.

I presented my two remaining aunts with a 12x12 book each at our family party and I am pleased to say that they were really delighted with them, so for that reason alone, all the hard work I did on them was very definitely worth it.

 While making this book I felt I had learned a lot more about how to use the Serif software which I consider to be the best crafting software currently available.  Many more people now have copies of this software and each of us seem to have discovered how to use different bits of it.  So with this in mind last night I set up a new group on Facebook for users to help each other, share hints, tips, answer questions and share their work.  The group is called Serif Craft Artist Users Group and in the first few hours we have gained forty members.  If you are a CA user, please feel free to join us - you would be most welcome.

Thank you for visiting my blog.

Catherine x