Our life stories

Welcome to Our Life Stories & Heritage Makers

December 17, 2010 at 12:41 pm (Uncategorized)

Hi! I’m Jen, a Heritage Makers personal publishing consultant. I help others preserve their memories and photos in custom books and make personalized home decor items and photo gifts.

Our online design studio is easy, affordable and doesn’t load down your computer with art files or your closet with papers and stickers!

I can show you and your friends how our one-of-a-kind design studio works and how easy it is to customize existing templates or make your own project from scratch.

I can do in-home workshops, at-the-computer demonstrations, talk you through a project on the phone or scan your older photos. I host digicrops, where clients meet at a coffee shop and work on projects and I can answer technical or creative questions. These will be listed in the sidebar to the left.

Log in or register for a free account try our easy online publishing studio. The entire studio is online. There is no software or art to purchase or download. Start a project at home, work on it over your lunch break at work or anywhere else you have internet access.

Are passionate about recording family histories or creating digital art? Are you looking to set your own hours and be your boss? Do you want to stay home with your children and still make some money? Ask me about becoming a consultant.

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K is for Kangaroo (pouch)

August 12, 2010 at 8:33 am (Alphabitty moments)

K was an easy letter. We absolutely love our Kangaroo Korner pouch. My husband and I can both wear it because of the snaps that make it adjustable. We wouldn’t have gotten through our baby’s first few months without it. I couldn’t find any pictures of my husband wearing the baby though, because he’s usually behind the camera.

I’m making an 8×8 ABC board book featuring photos of my kids. I aim to show you a new page each Thursday, to go along with MamaBear‘s Alphabitty Moments series. You can see the whole book in progress here.

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J is for jammies

August 5, 2010 at 1:10 pm (Alphabitty moments)

I had a hard time coming up with a word for J, but some twitter friends helped me out with suggestions. One was jammies, and I realized that was perfect for us because my kids spend a ton of time in their jammies. They have lots of them and they love them.

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G is for …

July 15, 2010 at 10:12 pm (Alphabitty moments)

Grace, giraffe AND gymnastics! It was just too much for one word or even one page.

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F is for fire truck

July 9, 2010 at 10:36 pm (Alphabitty moments)

This weekend, my kids and their cousins got to see the fire station where their uncle works. They were very excited even though our tour was cut short by an emergency call.

I’m making an 8×8 ABC board book featuring photos of my kids. I aim to show you a new page each Thursday, to go along with MamaBear‘s Alphabitty Moments series. I have missed the last two weeks. To see those pages, you can look at the whole book in progress at the link to the left. I also changed the first three pages a bit after getting feedback from my husband, who always helps improve my projects.

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Passion for personal history

June 28, 2010 at 1:46 pm (Why use Heritage Makers)

Wednesday marks the one-year anniversary of a call that has changed my life.

I became unemployed. And suddenly I didn’t know who I was or what to do with my minutes, hours, days, or my whole life. A friend helping me with my resume asked what I was passionate about. I wasn’t really sure. I enjoyed what I did for a living. I enjoyed it very much and wanted to keep doing it. But at the same time, I’d always said that I’d love if I could get paid to scrapbook all day long. Becoming a Heritage Makers consultant is my attempt to do that.

But why? Why am I passionate about scrapbooking?

It’s not about fancy design or showing my (limited) skills as an artist. It’s about preserving our personal histories. Keeping a record of our daily lives, our vacations, our kids’ habits. Creating something for us to look back on when we can no longer remember a child’s first word, a day with a special friend, the name of our favorite lake.

When I began scrapbooking in high school, I was just adding quick captions to photos. That was a good start and certainly better than shoving photos undated into a box. Since then, I’ve come to realize the importance of including the whole story. Many of my pages now include as many words as photos. And many times, I think of something I want to record and take photos to match the story, rather than only recording the stories that I’ve already taken photos of.

My hope is that when I’m gone, my children will use our scrapbooks to remember their childhoods and feel the essence of their parents and grandparents in the pages.

This post was written as part of The Marketing Mama’s Passion blog carnival. Link up your own posts about passion and read what these bloggers are passionate about:

Unveiling my Passions on Kate in the Kitchen
What am I Passionate About? on Pink Vanilla Cupcakes
Putting the P in Passion on Healthy Heart Journey
Living with Passion on Nightlight Journeys
Passionate About? on Challenge: 1 Year, No Restaurants
On Passion on Girl Meets Geek
What are you passionate about? on Dajon Design
Passion? on Little Animation
Passion for Personal History on Our Life Stories
Living with Passion on A Fit and Spicy Life
Passionately on I am cinnamom
Passion on Five Dollars a Day Blog

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Fishing and camping with Raspberry Roads!

June 12, 2010 at 6:36 pm (art)

One of the first digiscrap designers I discovered was Raspberry Road Designs back in 2008ish. And this month, two kits from her join the Heritage Makers repertoire!

One kit is realistic camping elements and one is realistic fishing elements. I have trouble finding these types of kits so I’m really excited that they came along just in time for our mid-June vacation and first camping trip of the season!

[Tacklebox_Elements_Preview.jpg]

If you were to buy these kits from Raspberry Road and download them to your computer, they would cost $14. But you get to use them free if you have a Premier membership!

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Tip: Unlock/lock all

June 8, 2010 at 6:20 pm (how-to, Studio)

This fabulous tip was on the Heritage Makers blog:

If you have a lot of objects on a page that need to be locked in place, locking each one individually can be a grueling task. But you can save yourself time and hair-pulling stress, by using a simple feature that locks—and even unlocks—all the objects on that page or in your project at once. Here’s what you do:

1. Click “Edit” on the menu.
2. Select “Lock” in the submenu.
3. Choose your locking preference. You can choose:
* Lock All on Page
* Unlock All on Page
* Lock All in Project
* Unlock All in Project

Using this feature will save time and make creating your project much better. If you’ve just placed a bunch of elements on a page, with one simple click you can ensure that you don’t inadvertently click, drag, or distort the elements you have placed so carefully.

Don’t forget about the shortcut key strokes. To unlock all on a page use: Ctrl+Shift+L; and to lock all on a page use: Ctrl+Alt+L.

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C is for Cake

June 3, 2010 at 8:54 am (Alphabitty moments)

I’m making an 8×8 ABC board book featuring photos of my kids. I aim to show you a new page each Thursday, to go along with MamaBear‘s Alphabitty Moments series

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