Maple Leaf Festival

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Maple Leaf Festival Baldwin KS

Hi, October is one of my favorite time of the year. The third weekend in October is always marked on my calendar. It’s a tradition of mine to go every year with a family member. Some years it has been all of them and this year my son, son-in-law and grand daughter was with me.

The atmosphere is just awesome; people, crafts, food, the smell, colorful leaves and plain ol’ fun.

maple leaf crowd
Maple Leaf Crowd
maple leaf food
Maple Leaf Food

The best part of the whole day was my souvenir. Yes, each year I like to buy one item to remind me of the day. This year was the best to date.

The Forever Hands booth. Once I spotted the Forever Hands booth I knew I found just the souvenir for this year. This was one of the very first booths we stopped at. Typically we walk throughout all of them and then I go back to the one I liked the best. There was no question or doubt, this was it.

A sculpture of my grand daughter’s hand- to last a lifetime. What a memory! Clickable gallery below.

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The last image in the gallery; I was worried Brie’s plaster hand was going to have a huge thumb! She was wiggling her fingers in the mold. Once the mold was set and Brie’s hand was removed; we were told to come back in a couple of hours while the plaster set. Upon our return; I was quite pleased……

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Forever Hands

This lovely sculpture is at home next to my computer. I look at it often while working and remember our Maple Leaf day together.

Have you ever preserved your children/grand children’s hand-foot print? Please do share!

Best Wishes,
debra

Ellen DeGeneres Visits KU

Hi, October and November are busy months- sorry for the delay in posts! This time of year is family portrait session with the beautiful autumn leaves. I took a much needed break. Did you hear…….

Ellen DeGeneres visits KU

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What an unexpected fun experience! Working most of the weekend on gallery edits- I took a moment to troll my Facebook account. Yes I call it trolling to keep up with family and friends near and far. I stumbled onto the above notice of Ellen coming to KU- Kansas University. That’s only 20 minutes from my house. Ellen is one of my favorites to watch on TV. Off I went!

Many people with lots of energy and excitement. I just added the 200-500mm lens to my camera gear which provided a fun outing to test the lens. The Ellen DeGeneres event took place between the football stadium and the hill in front of the Campanile Memorial. Ellen was not physically at KU. Her camera crew set up the satellite stage for Ellen to video conference with the crowd on the KU campus. She asked that everyone dress up as a Royal Baseball player. Several did and others like me did not. I had fun people watching! The gallery is featured below.

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This segment was taped live to be aired today- the first day of the World Series. Be sure to watch Ellen. I’m wearing a pink sweatshirt in the distant crowd to the right. I was told the camera could pano the whole audience.

Go Royals!

Best Wishes,
debra

Business Tools 101

business tools 101

Hi, would you like to have the tools for creating an awesome business or personal appearance? The online world has opened many opportunities for the individual and entrepreneurs. I would like to share some of my experiences I have learned through my photography business.

Being a small business owner, I have realized image is very important. This is also the same in personal endeavors. Presenting oneself is essential for success. Business Tools 101 will be a series of tutorials on what I consider the basic most important marketing materials for personal and business use. Notice how I said marketing materials?

Let’s begin with the tried and true – stationery letterheads. The digital era has overtaken hand written letters. Personalized stationery has many uses hand written or typed. Information written on the stationery can be saved as a pdf file for website download. Websites will be covered in the Business Tool 101 tutorial series.

When designing I personally prefer simple. Simple is more.

Lumapix Fotofusion is my design software of choice. Any designing program can be used (Photoshop Elements, Paintshop Pro are two examples).

MicroSoft Office Word is the word processing program that I use the most to type and save documents with. If you are interested in a free word processing program there are several to choose from: LibreOffice and several others can be found here.

Please note: I have not used the free word processors listed above. Should you give one of them a try, it would be nice to hear your thoughts on the program in the comment section at the end of this post.

Creating a Personal/Business stationery letterhead.

Create your design for a standard page 8.5 inches wide and 11 inches tall. Set the margin for all sides to 0.125 inches.

designing tool

Most consumer printers do not print edge to edge of the paper. This is the reason for the quarter of an inch margin around the letterhead design. Also note Microsoft Word documents have margin sizes as well. My default header margin is set at 1 inch. With this in mind, my header logo is 2 inches wide and 1 inch tall. At the end of this post is a pdf download link with the tutorial on gmasDiary stationery! Once your design is completed, save to a folder as a jpeg file. Be sure to save the jpeg file at 300 dpi resolution.

Once the letterhead image is created and saved, the next step is creating a Microsoft Word template with the newly designed letter head.

Creating a Microsoft Word document template

Once the you have opened your Word program the letterhead jpeg file will be added to the document as a watermark.

microsoft template

saving watermark

inserted watermark

You can save your themes to any folder. If you would like to have the theme appear in the My Templates, they will need to be saved in the default folder. Click on the ? in the upper right corner of the Microsoft Word screen. In the search box I typed the phrase, “what folder are my templates”. A similar screen as below should appear explaining where the default folder is stored on the computer version you have.

tada saved

tada saved

Creating a personalized letterhead pdf download.

Have fun with your letterhead!

Take Care,
debra