Bow Easy

Have you heard of the bow easy tool? I just watched this video on Stamp TV and this is definitely one tool I am going to have to get!! I love the idea of being able to make perfect bows! It comes in two sizes; small, which will make good bows for cards and scrapbook pages and large, for packages and wreaths!!

6th Grade Promotion

Last night my daughter transitioned from 6th to 7th grade. In our district that means she goes from elementary to middle school.

Our school makes a big deal about it and our teachers this year were awesome!!

A big fancy evening dessert with lots of awards, graduation music and a concert put on by the 6th graders were just a few of the highlights.

We had a balloon arch that stayed up until it was time to start and then decided to fall!!

The back ground paper came from Shabby Princess and the blingy daisy came from Ellie Lash

Digital Halloween

I'm really not this far behind on my scrapbooking (well, maybe I am on the kids scrapbooks!!). Anyway, this was done completely on the computer with Paint.Net. I really love that program!!

Everything I used was free on the web. If you look real close (click on the image for a larger version) at the flowers on the bottom you can see that the centers are eyelets!! I got them at freedigitalscrapbooking.com

I wish I could remember where I got the background paper because I love it.

The title is done on two separate layers so I could get the shadow effect.

This page is going in my son's scrapbook which is why it focus' on him and not "princess leia"!

Baklava

Here's another page for my digitally scrapped recipe book!!!

My husband really loves baklava and it's pretty easy to make so the last time I made I took pictures so I could add it to my book.

I did everything in Paint.net. I even made the background my self!!! I was really impressed and can't remember how I did it.

All I know is I started with a fractal image and then started changing it and adding different effects until it looked like this.

You can try this too since paint.net is free. Try the recipe also...it's fantastic!!

More digital scrapbooking

Here's my latest!! I'm very happy with the way this turned out.

I did the whole thing in Paint.Net. This is an excellent program for the weekend digi-scrapper (and it's free!!).

I go the "paper, ribbon, and butterflies" for free simply by searching the web. Just type "free digital scrapbooking" in your web-browser and you'll get tons of hit.

Everything is it's own layer. That is, the paper is the background layer, the picture is layer 2, the ribbon is layer 3 and so on. This makes it super easy to manipulate the page later on if something isn't quite working the way I wanted it to.

The butterflies are on two distinct layers. For the bottom layer, I placed the butterflies in the corners, went to "Layers", "layer properties" and set the opacity to 111. In the next layer, I offset the butterflies and left them the way they came. This gives the nice shadowy image I was hoping for.

The font is called Scriptina. You can download it here.

If you click on the photo you'll get a bigger version of it and you can see that I modified the picture to look like an oil painting. On the layer that holds the picture, I selected the picture. Next I went to "effects, then Artistic, then Oil Painting". I set the brush size to 3 and the coarseness to 50.

Free Stuff

Here are some links to get free stuff for scrapbooking. Fonts, papers, embellishments and patterns. Sometimes the free stuff changes but I've found that these always have something free!.
Merry Christmas!

Free Digital Scrapbooking

ScrapbookScrapbook

ScrapbookFlair (This is a fantastic site!)

1001 Free Fonts

WebpagePublicity

The Scrapbook Lounge (This is a great place to get ideas!)

Craft bits (lots of ideas here)

Digital Scrapbooking

My latest totally digital scrapbook page!!

This is my daughter's soccer team. A bunch of 6th grade girls who are more interested in having fun on the field than anything else.

I did this in Paint.net. Everything except the soccer balls is totally from paint.net. The hardest part for me was figuring out how the layers worked and worked together.

I spent more time on this than I was planning but I liked the way it turned out.

Scrapbook page bio

My daughter belongs to the "Friends" group at our church. Currently they are discussing peer pressure. There leader told them the best way to resist peer pressure is to have a good idea of who you are.

With that in mind, we had the girls do a scrapbook page of themselves (this is the one I did of me as an example for them).

Each girl wrote a "bio-poem". The poem can be changed to add or delete any information you want. I then typed up all the poems for the girls so they would fit on the page we were going to use (5.5 X 8.5).

I used my cricut to spell out each girl's name in a variety of fonts and formats so they would have a choice. Then last Wednesday I took a bunch of my scrapbooking stuff to church and we had a great time scrapbooking and talking about ourselves.

The girls worked hard on their pages and they really turned out great.

Guitar Lessons

Here's a page I did yesterday. The letters were done using my Design Studio and Printing Press cartridge. I welded the letters together and cut the red words and then enlarged the words just a bit and cut again in black.

As much as I'd like to take credit for the guitar, it's really a Jolee's.

The actual page doesn't have any black marks on the jounaling but I don't want to paste everyone's names on the internet.

All the paper came from Stampin Up.

End of Summer Fun

This is a page I did after we spent a day at a friends property. Lots of woods and a great pond for the kids to play in!

The boys were able to work at stripping the bark off some logs, Shelby got to catch her newts, and dad got to take a nap. What a great day!

When I first put the page together I was trying to figure out how to blow up the picture of the newt but still get Shelby, her friend, and the pond in the picture. I love this idea I came up with to show the whole scene and still have the close up. Digital cameras are great!

This chipboard flower is from Stampin' Up! I covered the flower with designer paper and after the glue dried, I sanded the edges. Then I put a brad through a couple of silk flower and glued those onto the chipboard flower.

I still need to add a title somewhere but I'm not sure what I want it to be yet.

Mini Scrapbook

Here's a quick and easy mini scrapbook that also makes a great gift for grandma.

You can make these as big or little as you want simply by adjusting the measurements.

The end product of this one is 4X4. I started with an 81/2 X 11 sheet of paper and cut it down to 8X8. I used an envelope flap for a template to make the closure.

Since I had so few pictures in this one I didn't have to worry about it not closing but you could add an extra fold along each edge so you could put more accordian folds in it.

You are going to want to decorate the front before mounting your picture in though, especially if you're planning on used brads, eyelets, or anything like that.

This is simply tied shut with gold cord but you could get as fancy as you'd like.

I have pictures on both sides of the accordian fold.

You can make these using a theme (all halloween or all christmas, whatever). They're quick and they mail nicely!

Digital Scrapbooking

Wowee-Zowee!! I did this whole page on the computer!!

This is an 8 X 8 layout of my daughter and her friends at camp. I used Paint.net to saturate the ice in the cones so it would stand out more.

I did all the layout in Open Office. Using the drawing program I laid on the background, the mat for the picture and the picture itself. Then I drew a rectangle and filled it with a bitmap "daisies". I found the flowers on the web using a google image search.

The rhinestone brads were an option in Open Office and the font I used is Bettyshand.

I really like the way it turned out but it really did take almost as long as doing it the normal way. I probably spent 45 minutes all together on this.