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Archive for July, 2008

Way too comical!

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

Okay, this is really embarassing, but I just have to show you that there is hope! I have had so many people tell me that they love what I do, but they are so intimidated by digi scrap. They think they will suck at it. I think I can safely say that MOST of us were really bad at this at the beginning! Right? Don’t believe me? YES, I made some completely UGLY pages! lol! I never used tutorials, only used freebies (I didn’t even know of any good stores yet)… so I apologize for the eyesores….

BWAHAHAHAH! See?! I told you! These are my 2 first pages EVER! I definitely don’t have them on my HD anymore. I was unpacking today (we moved 2 weeks ago) and I just found some CDs that I backed up last year and thought I’d look and see if my first pages were on them… yup! Wow. Just horrible.

I have come so far! Who knew such a bad scrapper would end up CT’ing for her very favorite designers??! So, if you are new and unsure of your scrapping skills… don’t be! I’m sure you were never as bad as this. Blah. I’m seriously giggling as I type this.

Okay, now it would be really unfair if I left you with such ugliness, wouldn’t it? Look how far I’ve come, baby! Wooohooo! I am still growing as a scrapper and it’s really fun seeing the change in my LOs over time.

Much better, eh? This last LO was made with the newest cookie. It is my fave cookie to date! Probably because it is based upon one of Cindy’s LOs and she is one of my fave scrappers of all time! Go get it at SSD!

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Playing Catch-Up…

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

FOBTY! Woohoo! Gotta’ earn those points. Apparently I am a country music kinda’ gal. Nope, I never listen to it, but oh well! Although, I think the description is fairly accurate!

You Are Country Music

You are friendly, down to earth, and fairly conservative.

You are true to your friends and your upbringing. Change is hard for you.

But beneath your old fashioned attitude, you are expressive and artistic in your own way.

Very few people can express pain and pleasure as eloquently as you can.

What Kind of Music Are You?

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FOBTY….

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

So, I haven’t done a lot of challenges this month at SSD because I’ve been really busy, but it’d be a shame if I didn’t earn my measly 10 points for the 20% off! I have 7, so I need to play catch-up on these blog posts….

Let’s see….. FOBTY 7/17 - summer jobs when you were a teen. Fun! My very first real summer job was retail at TJ Maxx… I didn’t like that job very much. I hate cleaning up after messy people. There were customers who felt it was OUR JOB to clean up their messes so they would take clothes off the racks and then thrown them over the rack (would it kill ya to hang it back up) or on the floor. Oh, and when people would try clothes on… ugh! RUDE! They wouldn’t even bother bringing me their clothes… just left them all on the floor, inside-out for me to go hang up. I hated working the fitting room. Then my senior year I worked at Subway. I was promoted to Assistant Manager and it was actually a really fun job! I was good at it and I had several friends who worked there with me. We would sing along to the radio (even had a customer walk in once when I was belting out a song while prepping bread for the proofer… lol), push eachother on the bread cart, shut people in the walk-in freezer… lol! We even had this long-running “Subway Soap” we used to act out. It was called “While You were in the Walk-in”…. hahahhaa. It was really fun. I loved that job. Good times.

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Making those photos POP!

Friday, July 25th, 2008

I never, EVER scrap a picture anymore without editing it. My new best friend has become OptikVerveLab’s Virtual Photographer plug-in for Photoshop/Photoshop Elements. I use it on every picture! You can download it here (it’s free!) and instructions for installing it are here. Sorry Mac girls, I think it only works with PCs.

Once it is installed, you can find it under Filter>OptikVerveLabs>Virtual Photographer and then you’ll get a pop up window where you can pick one of their presets and you can easily adjust any of the settings to achieve the look you want.

So, here’s a photo I took. I love the catchlights I got in Allie’s eyes, but the photo had little impact.

Here’s my edited photo. I will walk you through how I achieved this look.

So I took my original and opened up Virtual Photographer (found under Filters). Under the Presets pull-down menu, I picked Photocopy. I picked this preset because I loved the effect it had on the greens in my picture. However, the highlights were far too bright, so I played with the sliders under the Film Type section until her skin looked a little better but the grass still had that nice color to it. (These screenshots are clickable) Note: each preset has different results on different photos. Just play around with them.

After I applied my filter, my photo looked like this. Her skin is a little too washed out for what I was trying to achieve so I took it a step further.

I then duplicated the photo (right click on it in the layers pallete and select duplicate). I started playing with the blending modes on this duplicate until I found I liked the effect that “Multiply” gave (blending modes are found in a pull down menu on the top of your layers pallette left of “Opacity”). I then changed the opacity of this duplicate layer, playing with the opacity slider in the layers pallette until I liked what I saw. In this case, I set the opacity to 70%. Just play around with the blending modes to see what suits YOUR photo. The best way to get to know your program is to fiddle around with it.

And then that was it! I really do think it looks so much better. What do you think? I hope this was somewhat helpful. I love these filters. They really make your photos go from blah to WOW!

A few tips: when using the filters I always make sure the Film Speed gets set to 25 ASA because the higher you go, the grainier the photo gets. When a preset puts the Effect to “Soft” I bring the slider down to the left to avoid the photo looking too blurry or fuzzy (some of the presets have really, really soft effects that I don’t usually want).

Well, let me know if you have any questions about that! Here’s my LO using that picture:

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We have a winner!!

Monday, July 21st, 2008

Ding ding ding!!! So, rather than pulling names from a hat… I mean come on, that is so old school… I used one of the handy dandy online random number generators! 16 comments so I put the limits as 1 to 16 and the random number is….. drum roll please….. SEVEN! April! You win! Yay! Hehehhe. So, let me know what store you want for the $10 GC. PM me your email at SSD/DST/MSA so I can buy it then forward it on to you. Enjoy your goodies and big thanks to all who stopped by and left fun comments!

And another hybrid from me… this was a fun one! My first ink job. I’ve never inked edges before but it wasn’t that bad! I did ruin my khaki capris though… so sad. And it was the first time I’d worn them since before I got pregnant with my DD so I was excited they fit again. I thought I was being careful, but nope, not careful enough. Oh well.

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