Free Layered Templates – a digital scrapbooker’s dream!
Our friends over at Simple Scrapper have put together a wonderful collection of free layered templates that you simply must visit!
If you know of a free template, you can post a preview and link to the page where you can download the template, too. It’s a great way to discover fun new sites and designers you may enjoy, as well as browse for templates you can use!
I’ve added my recipe card templates (see them at the top left) and will go through my files and add more as I find them.
If you like the idea of ‘one-stop-shopping’ for template freebies like this, be sure to leave a comment for Jennifer letting her know!
Happy scrapping!
Freebie Finding – bits and pieces
This week I went looking for some bits and pieces to fill out some layouts. After a while we all have enough kits, but a great alpha or some bling can bring a new kit to life! Here’s what I found for you!
This alpha would be useful just about everywhere! It’s by designer Kristin Aagard. When you click on the image, you’ll go to her blog. Check out her Little Forest Winter kit, it’s just beautiful! Scroll past a ton of close-up previews and some beautiful CT layouts and be inspired! At the bottom of the post you’ll find the alpha freebie. Be sure to leave Kristin thanks and a kind comment on her great work! And poke around and look at her other kits – they’re really adorable!
I’m a sucker for good word art, and it doesn’t get any better than Bethany’s! If you aren’t familiar with her work, visit her blog and see what she’s got going on! I thought this one was funny, might use it on some little goodie bags this year. If you click on the header of the blog, you will see today’s post which is nice too! And in the sidebar she’s got category links for easy finding! If you like her word art, consider buying a set, they’re great value and good quality! If you need ideas for what to do with word art, we covered that in one of our tutorial crops, there are tuts in the crop forum here!
Studio Flergs has a great new kit out, and she’s offering this frame freebie! I think I have a lot of background papers this would work with, and it’s perfect for my teenager. It’s not even tooo too girly for my son! The kit is awfully pretty too, might have to add that to my wish list.
Click on the freebie category in the sidebar for some other great goodies. There’s some clustered stitching that is absolutely brilliant, and the link is still active.
I’m seeing a lot of these ‘photo masks’ lately, and honestly don’t always know what to do with them. This blog post by Dido Designs has some great CT layouts with great ideas! The set looks really neat, and I think I can find something to do with this freebie. I did a tutorial on one way you can use these masks here, and I’m thinking of working with some watercolor brushes on this one. I’ll bring the tut to a crop soon!
OK folks, that’s all I’ve got this week, if you know of some great goodies, leave us a link in the comments! DH is dragging me off to a movie, dinner and drinks with friends!!
Happy Scrapping!
I’m Back and MAN Do My Feet Hurt!
Professional Photographers of America is a great non-profit organization that supports… pro photographers! They offer training, competitions, advocacy and lobbying, and insurance and other services self-employed photographers can use.
This week is their annual convention, and people come from every corner of the photography world. You see school photographers and fashion photographers, ‘mom’ photographers, and commercial photographers. And let me tell ya, a couple thousand of them were in the Presidential Ballroom at Gaylord’s Opryland Convention Center in Nashville this morning!
I was able to get in as a part of Stan’s lab’s team, and paid my dues by helping set up the booth and unpacking all the samples and flyers they’d brought. But I went on behalf of YOU! My goal during the couple of hours I had to wander the trade show this morning was to seek out new stuff that would be of interest to scrapbookers.
It was interesting to see the response I got from various vendors when I mentioned that I taught Photoshop to scrapbookers. The Epson lady got ALL excited, and took my name to hook me up with a rep later! I got blank stares from a few other vendors, but the guys at PhotoshopCafe.com were very welcoming. (More on that soon!)
I saw some interesting trends:
- Cute is in. Everyone from seniors to wedding had a very graphic look. I saw a wedding album with the Bleeding Cowboys font
that looked very much like a digital scrapbook. There were whimsical frames, cute patterned camera straps and bags, and color color everywhere. - Everyone wants a scrapbook! A lot of the printed books that were being shown by various printers were available with scrapbook looking styles. Lots of little books, spiral bound brag books, and even accordion albums.
- People are less scared to print their own stuff. Epson was doing a booming business talking to photographers about printers. They didn’t even have anyone there prepared to talk about what I wanted to talk about, video projectors.
- Pro photo-printers are working hard to keep our business. There were some more original products out there this time, from dog-tags, much more fashionable jewelry, custom bags that weren’t just handbags, to a myriad of press printed products. I saw some AMAZING things on metallic paper, including 5×5 tri-fold invitations that were breathtaking. Pricing has come down a little on some products, which is always good for you and me!
In the next week or two, we’ll be giving away some of the swag I got on this trip. Vendors aren’t as free with the goodies as they used to be; even to get a shopping bag you had to have your badge scanned or give them a business card, for the most part. But I smiled sweetly, tried to look like I was prepared to buy thousands of dollars of stuff and got some lovely things for you!
So to kick things off, today I have a Nikon tote bag for you! (You can see the corner of it in the photo at top). Leave me a comment telling me what new photo equipment or products you’d like to purchase in the next year (from cameras, to accessories, to books and albums) and I’ll draw a random winner from the comments! ** CONGRATULATIONS PAULETT – enjoy your prize! Thanks to everyone else for your comments, sounds like we all need to win the lottery!**
Now to go soak my feet!
PS – keep a happy thought for Stan, the dude is working his butt off. He didn’t get back to his room until after 11pm tonight! If you follow him on Facebook he’s posting when he can from his phone.
Everyone loves a Freebie!
This week, I’m turning from supplies toward TOOLS for you! By “tools” I mean things that you can use over and over again in your scrapping. They aren’t kit specific, but useful tools – like fonts, brushes, textures, styles, etc.
First the fonts:
The Awesome font is free for personal use at dafont.com. I thought it was awfully cute and perfect for a pre-teen slumber party page!
Ursula Handschrift looks like a nice bold handwriting font for journaling. Sometimes I find script style fonts are too delicate to hold their own on a patterned paper, so this looks like a good option.
Don’t know why this appeals to me, but Gothical looks like fun. Maybe save it for Halloween, it would make great titles!
I love the free font Biscuit Tin. Wouldn’t it look cute colored in and made into stickers?
Here are some great free texture images. These would make great alphas, or blended into papers, or however they strike your imagination!
This series of wood textures is very well photographed and 2500 pixels wide so they will size up well.
This set of free grungy film textures is great for ‘aging’ your photos – they are free for personal or commercial use, but only about 500 pixels wide. So they’d be good for smaller images, but be wary of sizing them up too much, check your image at 100% zoom to make sure it doesn’t look blurry.
And lastly, here are some groovy – commercial use! – paisley brushes for you. They look very spring-like to me!
If you need ideas on how to use these tools, join us on Thursday nights for our Tutorial Crops! We have a blast chatting, and I always provide you a tutorial and goodies from our sponsors!
Over the next few months we’ll spend some time looking at how to use your brushes in creative ways, how to use textures and fun with fonts!
Next Thursday we have one of my favorite designers sponsoring us, and she’s sent me some wonderful gifts for all of you! Watch for my post Wednesday with a sneak preview and link to find the crop.
Happy Scrapping!
Freebies for the New Year!
I’ve been poking around, and found some wonderful things I just had to share with you!
The amazing and generous DigiVickie has some twill tape word art for the new year.
They have various Happy New Year sentiments, including my favorite “Ring out the false, Ring in the true”.
She even made it extra long so you can angle it without resizing! Now THAT’s thinking! Thanks, Vickie!
Click on the image to go to her site to download. Don’t forget to leave a little love and let her know we sent you!
Shabby Princess has this great holiday kit up – if you haven’t started your Christmas photos, this looks like a great kit!
The light blue would lend itself to snow photos, and I just love those trees. Except for the tree paper, all the rest of the papers aren’t really Christmas specific, so you will get some good use out of them. Those calico bows should come in handy from time to time too! A good all around winter kit, I think!
Click on the image to go to her site to download.
If you don’t know Waterlo Project, you should! They do these amazing kits, and give them away free!
The newest is Singing Vivaldi – it has elements for all four seasons! Scroll down to get the bonus photo masks, and check out the rest of the site.
I have several of their kits and use them regularly. They mix digitally made things and photographed then extracted elements. The extractions are done well, I rarely find something I feel I need to clean up!
Click on the image to go there to download.
Here’s a pretty little kit from Memory Makers magazine!
The image is linked to a page with a lot of their free kits on it, check them out! All the links seem like they are still active (I didn’t check them all) and there’s lots of good stuff.
You have to click thru to go to the next page to see the previews, though. Still, enough cute stuff, it’s worth the effort!
This kit is the next to last on the page – I just included the preview of the papers, but there are elements too!
Here’s one close to my heart – Technogeek! This wonderful little kit from Peppermint Creative is fun and funky – just the thing for scrapping that new tech toy you got for Christmas!
Hope you found something new to play with, be sure to leave love where you can and let them know we sent you!
