thank you

thank you everyone for your comments and emails!  I am having a blast going on this crazy creative journey with all of you.

Speaking of which, I will be posting a couple new December Daily freebies coming up here in the next few days.  If you're anything like me, you run out of fun number ideas really quick. Our family actually does two Christmases (one with our family in Eastern Washington the day after Christmas) so I go all the way to 31...and usually hit a wall around day 15 or so lol.

Stay tuned sports fans!

December Daily freebie

After doing my day 17 page I realized that it would be fun to offer the "hello Tradition" journaling box that I designed to anyone that could use it.  It is a bit of a funky size, 5" high by 5.67" wide (I sized it to my page), but hopefully you can make it work with your project. 

If you are just using it as a black and white element, you can click on the image above to see the full-sized, print-quality version and "right click" to save it to your computer.  Or you can download the zipped up .png file by clicking here.

You can re-color the element by following the steps on the Designer Digitals website here.  Let me know if you use it - I'd like to start doing more of these freebies if they are useful.  Have a creative day!

I have finally joined a kit club

I have been wanting to join a scrapbook kit club for a while now, and after searching for a few months I have found one that I absolutely love:
I ordered their June kit awhile back and I just loved it, I have made several layouts from that kit along with a journal (or two LOL, I love making journals). And this is a good way to keep my scrapbook supply spending under control, if I know that I'll be getting a monthly delivery of scrapbook goodies I'm less likely to shop.

Speaking of SC, here is a project I put together today (too hot here in Seattle to do much of anything else), I wanted a larger journal so I found some 5 x 8 index cards that I used for the pages. I'm so not a photographer so the picture is kind of crappy:


I used a page from an old 1907 French to English dictionary (thank you eBay!) for the middle of the page and papers from the Studio Calico June Kit for the top and bottom. And as you can see, I am loving my typewriter. I actually put an index card straight in the typewriter, typed the words then used my favorite butterfly punch from Martha Stewart Crafts and my 1.5" circle punch to punch out the words. Then I stitched with my sewing machine and attached the index card to a sheet of medium-weight chipboard. I also glued a plain 5x8 index card on the same large sheet of chipboard for the back, then cut both out with my heavy-duty rotary cutter - just a note here, never use a regular paper cutter to cut chipboard! Trust me, I unfortunately know from experience.

Then I rounded the corners of the chipboard pieces and a bunch of notecards with my corner chomper - I am in love with this tool by the way, hole punched the chipboard and a bunch of notecards and Viola! A finished project.

Have a creative day everyone!

digital scrapbooking freebie

I am a hybrid scrapbooker. What does that mean? I use both digital and conventional scrapbooking techniques to create my layouts. This is actually a fairly new thing for me (only in the past two years or so), when it finally hit me that I can use my graphic design skills on my scrapbook layouts as well.

Now I personally don't like going 100% digital, I like "real" elements that you can touch and feel. But adding text or a border, resizing or even desaturating a photograph, nothing beats Photoshop (or photoshop elements, I highly recommend that...much, much cheaper).

As some of you know, I am a huge follower of Ali Edwards. I feel such a strong kinship with this woman - we both have boys with special needs, both live in the Northwest, both are work at home Moms and both have the same fun and funky "out of the box" scrapbooking style. And recently she has been doing a lot with digital elements on designer digitals -
http://www.designerdigitals.com/digital-scrapbooking/supplies/index.php/cPath/36_209.

Today on her blog, she introduced a new line of word elements that I just love - the effect is very "ghost letter"-ish. And then she put in a rounded rectangle around it (which I always love). Today I'm offering a freebie inspired by Ali's new design:

I wanted to mix it up a bit by combining the upper and lower-case letters and of course, adding my favorite typewriter font in there. I like my corners quite a bit rounded, up to 1", however this design features a half an inch rounded corner. I also manually added a drop shadow in there which I almost always do.

You can download the file from my website by clicking here, it is an 8.5x11 .png file in white which you can easily recolor in Photoshop using Jessica Sprague's Photoshop Friday technique: http://spraguelab.squarespace.com/blog/2007/3/23/photoshop-friday-2007-12-re-coloring.html.

Have a wonderful Wednesday everyone!