Happy Thanksgiving everyone! And because it’s Hybrid Thursday, and because it’s Thanksgiving (at least in some parts of the world), I thought I’d share a thank-you card I made recently. Everything was made from Mari Koegelenberg’s All Spice kit (SSD), and I only added a bow to it.
For many of us, November is a great time to stop what we’re doing for a moment and think about all the blessings we have. Darcy Baldwin (Sweetshoppe) has created a set of templates/quickpages using Meghan Mullens kit Count Your Blessings, which helps us do just that: her Count Your Blessings Album is a perfect tool to record happy moments and thoughts with just a few mouse clicks. Her album is a ready set of pages, but the quickpages come layered so you can easily clip your own papers to them and add embellishments, which makes this album super versatile and perfect for a little project to remember what you’re thankful for in November 2012.
Here’s a page I created with one of the templates from this pack:
Winter is coming. I can tell by how cold it’s been getting lately. So, it’s about time for me to get everything ready for the coldest season of the year. Today, that meant taking my down coat to the dry cleaner.
Maybe, where you are from, down coats are not very common for the average person. But here, I assure, they come in very handy once the cold strikes. That day hasn’t quite come yet, but it will certainly come soon. And when it comes, I’ll be prepared …
The holiday season is upon us, and that means some of us are busy busy making cards to send to loved ones and friends. I at least have made it a priority again this year, to create more handcrafted cards, after I failed at it miserably last year. And since I’m someone who tends to get bored with repetition, I’m always looking for new ideas that I can incorporate in my own card making. The www is a great source of inspiration, and over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been able to dig up some treasure or other to inspire one of my own cards. Being a person with both limited time and limited resources, however (craft stores where I live are not what craft stores are in Northern Europe or North Amereica), I have a few guidelines to govern the choice of projects I create:
A very fun way to create simple cards with a great wow effect, is to use paper piecing patterns. There are tons of patterns and templates on the web which you can download for free, and all you need to do is turn them into clipping masks for your digital scrapbooking papers.
Generally, the patterns which I find work best are those that come with simple black lines, such as this holly leaf pattern you can find at silkysteps.com:
Once I’ve found a pattern, and downloaded it, I open it in photoshop and using the Magic Wand Tool, I click inside the lines of the image (e.g. the leaf). From there I can either copy the shape and paste it directly onto my canvas to use as a clipping mask, or I can still tweak the selection (marching ants) a little. (Using the directly pasted shape often comes with jagged edges, etc. So in that case before I copy and paste, on the original pattern, after creating my selection, I go to Select > Refine Mask, and apply the Smooth option – playing around with the settings will help you decide what looks best.) I also like to expand the selection by 1-2 pixels to include the outline. Often I create a new layer and fill the selection with a solid color before I drag the new shape layer onto my canvas. Having a solid colored clipping mask usually gives me better options in case I want to play with styles and blending.
Whichever way I go about this, usually paper piecing patterns have helped me create some fun elements that I can add to cards and my digital scrapbook pages.
Tip:
High resolution images work best for clipping.
This card was created using a paper piecing pattern from scrapbooksetc.com, extracting it from the pdf and using the shapes as clipping masks to clip papers from a digital scrapbook kit to it. I printed everything, cut, and put everything together – quick and easy.
The best of the three pictures taken before the battery went out
I don’t believe in deja vus, really, and I doubt their overall usefulness, but let me tell you what happened to date … exactly a year ago: I had arranged to go out on an autumn photo shoot with my friends. I’d prepared my camera, recharged my batteries, and done everything necessary to be ready for an afternoon with my friends and my camera. But, lo, as soon as we wanted to start to shoot, my camera’s batteries quit their job, never to work again. And so, I ended up being a by-stander in our so well planned-out autumn photo shoot.
Now, listen to this: Exactly one year later, namely today (though I only realized afterward), I’d arranged with one my friends to go on another autumn photo tour. But guess what happened, as soon as I got out my camera to start snapping away? You’re right! Something happened that seemed quite familiar to me – like a bad kind of deja vu! The batteries refused to work yet again, and all I got was a couple ground shots for when I was still checking the settings. (Though this time it really was my own fault. Knowing that the battery needed to be recharged soon, I should have checked my camera bag to make sure the other battery – which was charged – was in there and not in the closet where I found it sleeping away happily after I got back home.)
So, note to self: even though you may think your camera will work because you’ve taken care of your batteries, there’s always that odd chance where things are not the way you thought they were. So, always double check before you go on a photo shoot. Then you may actually use your camera for picture taking, and not just for carrying it around as an extra accessory!
PS. And I wonder what’s gonna happen one year from now …
Though I didn’t grow up celebrating Thanksgiving the way any Americans would do, Thanksgiving has become a more important holiday to me over the last couple of years. And anyways, I think we can always work at becoming more thankful, so today’s journaling prompts are naturally all about the upcoming holiday, and the things we can be thankful for in our lives …
And here’s my take on one of these prompts:
Don’t give up: Even the weakest light can hold back the darkness!
~ anonymous ~
Credits:
North Pole by Mari Koegelenberg
Bad Sewing Machine – Randomly Black and White by Traci Reed
Layered Titles Christmas – Set 1 by Cindy Schneider
Font: An Inkling by Darcy Baldwin & Kristin Cronin-Barrow
Admitted, it’s still a little early for Christmas, but since I love the season, and since my recent shopping experience exposed me to some pretty neat Christmas stuff around here, and since I really wanted to use one of my recent purchases, I decided to do a Christmas page. And I found myself a fun paper layout to scraplift and turn into a digital version.
Here’s Kelly Goree’s sample page, which I totally loved as soon as I saw it:
And here’s my take on it:
I’m absolutely stoked, because today I have something special to share with you – my first ever full digital scrapbook kit! I recently got my fingers very itchy to create a layout based on a certain color scheme, but since I didn’t have anything of the likes in my scrap stash, I decided, to just make my own kit. And now, with Thanksgiving and such coming up, I thought, why not turn it into a full kit that I could share with others as well? So, voila! Instead of my usual template freebie, I have this, and hope you won’t be too disappointed, if you’ve waited for a new template.
Click on image to download
Anyhow, I’ll be sharing this kit over the next couple of weeks, so be sure to come back to pick up the remaining parts. But for now, here’s part 1 of “A Grateful Heart”. Happy scrapping, and happy Friday, scrappers!
