Chatique with Laura Lou

You have looked through magazines and greeting cards, flipped through your sketch book, checked the templates and quick pages, wandered through your Favorites gallery, but you are still stuck.

ORGANIZE (or re-organize if you are one of those already organized people). Check the state of your folders: Elements, kits, templates, alphas, quick pages, and whatever else you may have been collecting.

There is a great little free utility called Folder Marker http://www.foldermarker.com/ that lets you change the colors of folders. You can even mark them by priority, but I only use the colors right now. The Pro version is $20, but the freebie is just fine.

SUPPLIES: My digital supplies are organized in two ways. On my main computer, I have everything organized by website, first then designer name. Over the years I have found that, because I like to do challenges, etc., I usually look for kits by designer name, first. If all of the kits are labeled the same way they sort of organize themselves. So a kit in my system would be labeled: designer_K_name of kit
Instead of _K_, the other categories are
Alpha, _A_
Background, _B_
Crafts, _C_
Embellishments, _E_
Kits,_K_
Overlays,_O_
Ploppers, _P_
Templates, _T_
WordArt _WA_

On the laptop, I fell back into my classroom organization...by month. By Month goes like this:
001-Jan-new year-winter-snow-tropical
002-Feb-love-valentines
003-Mar-wind-St-Pats-colors
004-Apr-Easter-garden-flowers-bugs
005-May-spring, mother, women, BCA
006-Jun-grads-dads-men
007-Jul-summer-birthday-patriotic
008-Aug-travel-beach
009-Sep-school-harvest
010-Oct-Halloween-outdoor-camping
011-Nov-Thanksgiving
012-Dec-Christmas
013-Wedding
014-Vintage
015-Child
016-Animals-Birds
017-Disney-fantasy-movies
018-Food
019-Color
020-Basics
021-Family

Once you have your folders all set up, and colored so you can find them easily, you may want to list what is in each folder, especially the Kits one. For this I use another little free utility, PrintFolder ( http://www.sofotex.com/downloads/d2071.html ). Both of the utilities I mentioned reside in your fly-out menu when you right-click on a folder.

PHOTOS: For organizing my photos I rely on Picasa ( http://picasa.google.com/ ) It is also free and part of the Google suite so quite reliable. I actually took a class so I would learn how to use all the niceties in that program. I use Photoshop CS2 so there is the "Bridge" attached for showing the scrapping elements. It would also work for organizing photos, but doing elements AND photos in the same program would just confuse me. I prefer to keep them separate.

FONTS: For organizing fonts (I have over 3,000) I use Font Thing, ( http://www.download.com/The-Font-Thi...-10038296.html ) another free program. You can sort and resort your fonts into categories as well as install and uninstall them easily.

Good ways to beat the time when you are uninspired.