I’ve always wanted to have my own stationery. I wasn’t looking for anything fancy – just simple and classic. I liked the idea of having a monogram that I could also use on my blog as the header and as my email signature to keep everything consistent.

I discovered Emily Ley of Emily Ley Paper in January while reading a new to me blog written by Lara Casey. To be perfectly honest, I didn’t put a whole lot of effort into researching different designers. That’s actually rather unlike me. Usually I compare prices, read reviews, look for deals, etc… when purchasing anything. So why did I choose Emily?

After reading a few of Emily’s blog entries, and watching this video blog post – The First 30 Days – I was completely sold. Unlike many blogs that I have read, when the posts are mainly product or services oriented, I was struck with how openly she shares her experiences both as a business owner and regarding her life in general. As corny as it sounds, I felt as if I knew her in a way. It was clear that she cares very much about what she does. That totally made the decision for me – I wanted to order my monogram and stationery from her. 

I was a little nervous ordering from someone I had never met but Emily made the process very easy. She offered several options and unlimited revisions of my monogram so it would be just right but it only took two until I found a design I loved. She was very professional and responded to any questions I had quickly.  She even provided me with several digital versions (with and without my email and/or phone number) which is wonderful because this means I can use the monogram in lots of different ways.

I was so excited to get the stationery in the mail yesterday and I’m writing my first letter with it tonight to my favorite Aunts. They were home economics teachers years ago and I know they will appreciate a hand written note from me – even if my handwriting isn’t as pretty as the stationery!

Monday

No School. Thanks to my hubby, we dug my car out just in case there was school on Tuesday.

Tuesday

No school, but I did make it to Starbucks to meet some friends!

Wednesday

No School. Snow Storm #2. We got a lot of snow. Again.

Thursday

No school. We started running out of food so we ordered Dominos Pizza. This is supposed to be shaped like a heart.

Today

Peter was back to work, but I was still off. We had a Canadian themed dinner to celebrate the opening ceremonies of the Winter 2010 Olympics. We tried Canadian beer for the first time. We ate a dessert that will most likely rot our teeth.

My laptop is nearly perfect. It’s fast (works in Photoshop and Lightroom processing images with amazing speed) and its pretty. But it has a major flaw: something goofy is wrong with the hardware.

From the second day after it arrived, I noticed that the “p” key only sometimes worked. Occasionally it would miss when I was typing and at other times, like now, “qe” or “qerw” comes out instead. Frequently it wouldn’t work at all. Several other keys began to miss soon after and now I have to rely on copying the characters that don’t work into Notepad and using the On Screen Keyboard. 

I called the Envy Technical Support line on Friday night. I was feeling extremely frustrated and disappointed that after all of my recent computer troubles, and after waiting for my laptop much longer than was originally promised because of shipping delays, I had received faulty hardware. The person I spoke with was quite nice, but quickly came to the conclusion that I must need a new computer all together because I had faulty hardware (she had me enter a recovery area of the unit which is evidently outside of Windows and since I could not type with the keys in question there she determined that I had faulty hardware, not software). No other suggestion was offered to me at that time (i.e. it was never brought up that I was fully under warranty and had purchased additional 3 year protection that I could use). She then proceeded to transfer me to the HP Home Shopping Store and everything went downhill quickly from there.

I had an incredibly difficult time understanding the sales representative. Long story, filled with terrible customer service from several levels, short, I will be shipping my Envy back for warranty service tomorrow. My warranty contract states that I should receive my computer back within 5 business days and that is much faster than the estimated one plus months I was repeatedly quoted (at least I think that is what they said).

I am feeling frustrated with the entire situation right now. I got a shiny new toy after a terrible computer disaster that I hoped would make everything smooth sailing again, only to have a shiny busted new toy that I have to go through the hassle to ship back and more time to wait. I’m out a significant amount of money which makes the whole thing worse.

I was inspired recently by a project I read on the blog of one of my favorite digital designers, Liz, of Paislee Press. She completed a project that she refers to as Off to Press where she put together an album with 296 pages using templates that she created. I love her designs because they are very minimalist in nature and these templates looked like they would be perfect for my project because they are very simple and have the perfect amount of white space so I can add a few words here and there if I want, or I can leave them as is. Once I learned that Liz had two sets for sale (and if you buy them together there is a discount), I quickly snapped them up.

The templates are designed for use in Photoshop which is what many templates are designed for, however I prefer to design multipage albums using InDesign. I’m much more familiar with Photoshop, but when I designed our wedding album last fall, I learned the basics and discovered that it did some things much faster than Photoshop and that it was easier to work with multiple spreads (in fact I’m not even sure if it’s possible to do that in Photoshop, at least not that I have discovered).

I spent most of last night importing (I learned that this is called “placing”) the Photoshop psd files into InDesign. It would appear that the individual layers no longer work the same way once you get them into InDesign (although I did discover how to see the layers), so most of my time was spent creating frames to place the images into. My favorite part about using InDesign to work with Album layouts is that once you have the album spreads set up with frames the actual album creation process goes pretty fast. I can drag a photo from the folder I’ve stored it in to InDesign, drop it on the frame and fill the frame proportionally with just a few, quick key strokes.

It will be awhile before I’m finished, but here are a few of my initial layouts (any strange lines you might see are called “guides” – they won’t print, they just help me lines things up. And the empty boxes are just placeholders for potential text).

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