My  Memories Suite is a digital scrapbooking software that makes your scrapbooking efforts easy. They recently came out with their Version 2.0 and so I thought I’d give you tutorial on how to digital scrapbook with it. I’m going to show you how to create a scrapbook page from scratch. This also gives you an opportunity to take a peek at the software’s features. Okay, here we go.

1. Upon opening the My Memories Suite (MMS) program, you’ll see a window that says, “New Album Options”. Select the option that says “Design Your Own”.

My Memories Suite Tutorial Step 1

2. You’ll be asked to name your album. You also need to instruct the program where you want the file to be saved. So just fill in these information at the specified places. You also have to choose how you want your page to look like: landscape, square or portrait. For this tutorial, I selected the square shape.

My Memories Suite Tutorial - Step2

3. You will be presented with a list of pre-designed layouts. Since we are creating from scratch, select the first one on the list that says “Blank Page.”

My Memories Suite: Select Your Layout

4.  On the right hand side, you’ll see your control panel. This is where you select your background, add photos, embellishments and text. If you click on the drop-down arrows, it will expand your list of options. Let me show you real quick what the scrapbook page looks like. Then I will explain how to add each element.

My Memories Suite: Sample Layout

5. First thing you do is add a background. Expand your list and you will see the image below. I clicked the following to get the background I wanted: Paper – Stripes – Thin Stripe – Cranberry

My Memories Suite: Selecting Background

6. To add a photo, you click on “Photos” on your control panel. Click on the box that says “Add” (the one with the image of a camera). You then select which photo on your computer you want to use.  As you can see, there are many tools to edit your photo. If there is red-eye, you can fix that. You can zoom-in and crop to cut out unwanted distractions.  The ’shape’ option allows you to ‘cut’ your photo into certain shapes like a heart, circle, diamond, square, star etc…. With this sample layout of mine, I added a mat.  I forgot to add a  shadow. I should have done that. Anyway. I clicked on “effects” and brightened the photo a little.

My Memories Suite: Adding Photos

7. Next I added the embellishments. The stitched flowers, curved stitching, scroll flourish, brads and dotted knots I used are all under the embellishment selection. Just click and go through what you want to decorate your page with. Move them around or rotate them to get the look you want.

My Memories Suite: Choosing Embellishments

8.  Right click on any image to change the layer order of  it. For example, if the photo was on top of the stitched flowers and I wanted it to be underneath, I would click “Send to Back”.

My Memories Suite: Layer Order

9. It is good to give your scrap page a title to highlight what your scrap is about. Since the purpose of my scrap is to journal baby’s habit of chewing her thumb, I used the “Word Art Designer” to craft out the words “Little Chomper”.  After selecting my font and the size of the text, I continued to give it a shadow and selected “Enable Shape” to make the words curve.

My Memories Suite: Adding Word Art

10. Last of all, I clicked on “Text” to add some journaling. You don’t really want too fancy a font when journaling. The idea is to keep it legible.

My Memories Suite: Adding Text

10. When you are all done, you want to be careful when saving your work. All you have to do is click on the “save” icon as shown below. You don’t have to click on “File” and “Save as”. Doing so will create a duplicate file.

My Memories Suite: Saving Your File

11. If you want to share your file, go to your control panel and select “Share Album”. You can print out the pages or export it to JPEG to post on your blog or email.  You have a choice of exporting your file into different sizes: Large, Medium, Small and for Web/Email. You can also create calendars and greeting cards. If you want to make a CD/DVD, choose”Multimedia Output”.

My Memories Suite: Sharing Your Album

My Memories Suite: Exporting Files

I hope you have found this tutorial helpful. In this tutorial I only used backgrounds and embellishments that came with the software. You can actually use your own scrapbook stuff too. I’ll leave that for another tutorial.

My Memories Suite ScrapBook Software. Please click here for more information.

p.s.: Yes, the link is an affiliate.