My gorgeous girls...

My DD2 turned two on Christmas Eve and on the day of her birthday we took the girls along to have some professional portrait photos taken. They came out gorgeous... which means I now have a bunch of beautiful photos to scrapbook. :)

 

This is one of my favourites:

 

 

I made this digital scrapbook page using the Lovely Visions kit from Creative Victorian Designs. :)

Digi-Scrapping

I've been in the mood for scrapping lately but don't seem to have had the time... or the willpower to get off the sofa in the evenings! :lol:

So, thanks to the wonders of modern technology (i.e. my laptop and PSE 10!) I've been digi-scrapping. :)

First of all I made a double page of photos of my gorgeous girls playing in the garden the other weekend:

All the digi elements on these pages are from the Summer Wings kit by Creative Victorian.

Next up I did the Weekly Challenge at UKS:

I used a Creative Victorian kit again, this time Winter's Deep... and also used one of the actions that comes with the kit to wash out the photos so they all toned nicely.

And finally, I had a play with a page using photos of DD2 (mildly inspired by an article in a recent issue of Scrap365 about using small photos on scrapbook pages):

This time the kit was Secrets of the Heart from Creative Victorian.

I do plan to actually get in my craft room this week and do some paper scrapbooking... but I do love being able to craft on the comfort of my sofa! :D

Hiya!

"Hiya" is pretty much my DD2's favourite word. To be fair, it's not far off being her only word! :lol: Her vocabulary at present pretty much consists of "Hiya", "Buh-bye", "Mama", "Dada" and "Nigh-nigh" (night-night), and of these "Hiya" gets by far the most use! :)

It makes people giggle in the supermarket/post office/bank* when she sits forward in her pushchair, shouting "Hiya!" to everyone who passes. :)  *delete as appropriate

She really is a cutie. And she's also the subject of my two most recent scrapbook pages, which is why I'm waffling on about her! :lol:

The first LO was done for the monthly challenge on UKS and followed a sketch provided:

My starting point for this LO was that I had some lovely transparent patterned tapes that I bought a while ago off QVC and which I've not used yet... and I thought they would work really well with the sketch for this challenge. I also didn't have any plain white 12x12 cardstock (must rectify that!!) to use with the tapes so I found a pale grey sheet instead and a nice shade of pink... and the combination put me in mind of the pretty party dress DD2 wore for her 1st birthday last December.

I rather like how these tapes look, especially when overlapped a little. Will be having a play with these again soon, I think. :)

I enjoyed sitting and playing with my stash to make this LO too. I started in papercrafting as a scrapbooker and still consider myself a scrapbooker, but over the years, as my experience and confidence has grown, I've expanded my interests into so many other crafting areas, from cards to ATCs, to tags, to circle journals, to art journals and altered items... and it sometimes seems like the one thing I rarely actually do much of anymore is scrapbooking! :lol: And when I do scrapbook, it often tends to be digi, cos I can do it sitting on the sofa with the laptop while the kiddies wreak havoc around me! :lol:

And that's exactly what I did today. :) While DD2 was having a nap and DD1 was sat happily colouring with crayons, I sat and made this LO for the Simple Recipes challenge on UKS:

I loved the colour palette for this month's challenge and, by happy coincidence, one of the digi-kits that I bought yesterday had exactly the right colours. All the papers and elements here are from the Summer Wings kit from Creative Victorian Designs.

ATC experiments

I've been making a few ATCs lately, using a variety of techniques. I love playing with ATCs... they're the perfect-sized canvas to work on, a nice size, not too big, meaning they can be completed fairly quickly and are great for playing with new ideas and techniques.

The first set I made used fairly simple inking and stamping techniques and started out from me wanting to have a play with the Distress Stain watercolour stamping technique featured in the March issue of Craft Stamper magazine:

I also used my Flexmarkers on this to colour in the stamped butterfly image.

The second set I made was a much more collaged affair. I used acrylic paints and PVA glue to make the crackled background and then stamped over the background and inked the edges and collaged images stamped variously onto cardstock, vellum and matt gold cardstock to make the final image.

I'm entering this ATC into this week's "Kings and Queens" challenge over at Simon Says Stamp and Show.

And finally, I had a play with making digital ATCs. And yes, I'm still on that Sherlock kick. ;) I used a screencap from the show and used PSE 10 to collage it together with elements from the Inner Storm digikit (from Creative Victorian) and some text.

The first two sets of ATCs are pretty much accounted for in various swaps but I'm printing a limited run of the digi ATCs and will have a couple for swapping if anyone's interested?

Ali: 1 - PSE: 0!

I've dabbled in digi-scrapping for a while now. I still love to physically scrap but digi is fun too and has the major advantage that I can do it while lazing on the sofa watching TV! :D Plus it's good value for money as of course you only have to buy digi elements once and then can use them over and over and over (and, oh my, there are some gorgeous kits out there!).

However, I've found my digi-scrapping a bit limited by the software I was using. I've been using Scrapbook Factory and while it's a great basic program and very intuitive and easy to use, it simply can't do the more advanced functions like blending images into one another or using brushes. I did used to have Photoshop Elements some years ago but my computer has been reformatted/rebuilt several times since then and I've never been able to find the disc to reinstall it. And of course now it'll be several versions out of date anyway. So I've been seriously hankering to get PSE back on my computer for some time... so when I saw Amazon offering PSE 10 for £30 recently, I snapped it up!

It arrived and was installed yesterday and today I have begun experimenting. I have to say that I have never found PSE (whatever version I had) to be particularly easy to get on with - the controls are not intuitive and trying to work out how to achieve the result you want is often an exercise in frustration. However, knowing this in advance, I girded my loins and let battle commence!

It took a serious chunk of time, a lot of googling for info/tutorials - and quite a bit of swearing! - but in the end I prevailed... and so I can now proudly unveil my very first PSE-created digital scrapbook page:

I'm really rather pleased with this. I've managed to achieve the clever, "professional"-looking effect that I see in digi pages in the gallery on UKS and I feel like this is my first "proper" digi page. :)

Btw, all the gorgeous elements on this page are from the Inner Storm kit by Creative Victorian (check em out - they have some stunning kits!).