Seems my scrapping time has “come up missing” (one of my favorite oxymorons)!

It was graciously pointed out to me that my photoshop scrapbooking group hasn’t seen a new layout from me in a while! Not that I am a prolific scrapper – I’m a slow worker and a layout or two a week is doing well – but I’ve been particularly out of time to scrap since the first of the year.

So I went looking to see what I might have that I never sent through the group, and found… ONE layout.  Whoohoo! Better than nothing.  Then I noticed that this layout was made with supplies all of my own creation – except the adorable alpha which is by Studio Rosey Posey.

Not only are the papers, frames and brushes all mine – they’ve all been given away as freebies at crops or on the blog!

I thought I ought to re-share them for those of you who’ve not made it to a crop or missed the blog post.

Here are the links:

Papers
Frames
Brushes

If you get a chance to make something with these, please leave us a link in the comments, we’d love to see your work!

Happy scrapping!
Jenn

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If you’re like me, you’ve done a fair amount of your holiday shopping online this year.  There are pros and cons to that:

PROS:

• you can do in in your jammies (or even less, if you’re so inclined…)
• you can shop at any hour on any day of the week.
• no dodging crazy people in the parking lots.
• no dodging crazy people in the stores.
• WAY easier to comparison shop.
• some great deals to be had online only.
• you can read reviews to see what other buyers thought.

CONS:

• you can comparison shop for hours if not days and still not make a decision!
• you have to wait to get your goodies.
• shipping charges (if you can’t find a free-shipping deal)
• you don’t get to see or feel the thing you’re buying in person.
• sometimes websites have less-than-adequate information about the product.
• you have to dispose of all the boxes and packing materials
• you have to keep track of what’s arrived and what hasn’t.

It’s that last one that’s always my problem – I don’t always remember what I ordered or what I just looked at and decided to order later, so I find myself combing through my “shopping” email folder looking to see what’s what.  And since I don’t always remember to move things into my shopping email folder, I then have to comb through my inbox to look for anything I may have missed.

I used to print out those ‘confirmation’ pages that you get at the end of a transaction, and put them together in a drawer.  Then I could pull them out as the items arrived and see what was left to come.  But this year we’ve moved our office, and I don’t always have easy access to the printer (not to mention the cost of ink and paper for something I’m just going to throw away.)

My new solution?  CutePDF. This is a program I’ve had for years, and used exclusively to make .pdf files until I got Adobe Acrobat.  It’s free, and works great.  The best part is, I can now print all those pesky confirmation pages to .pdf files and save them on my desktop.  Once the packages arrive I can delete them – no muss, no fuss.

Once you have the program installed, when you go to print something, you’ll see CutePDF as a printer option.  Choose that, and it’ll bring up a little Save As dialog box where you can rename it and choose where to save it.

This has saved me countless pages of paper, and should I NEED to print something out, I just open up the .pdf and print it!  I hope you’ll find it useful too

BTW – all the elements in this post are from my Fab-fa-la-la kit which I know many of you already have.  But if you don’t, download links are below! No confirmation page required!

Download papers

Download elements

Download addon

Happy Shopping!
Jenn

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My darling husband always makes the cutest tags for our gifts – he does each one in Photoshop, with custom little sayings and photos that give a little clue as to what is inside!  I wish I could put my hands on some of them now to show you, but they’re tucked way away in my memory box. 

I, on the other hand, am all about mass production!  I like to make one set of tags, print out a ton of them, and go to town tagging all the gifts as I go.  Some years I even think far enough ahead to print them on sticker paper for ease of application.

Yesterday I stumbled across this beautiful kit on a new site, Anelia.net.  Anelia has some wonderful things in her shop, and I just couldn’t resist making my tags with her Classic Christmas kit. It’s rich colors and ornate designs go well with the Victorian theme I have going this year, so I think these tags will go great under my tree! And Anelia very generously said I could share my tags with you!

I made them as a printable .jpg file for you, and bundled them in with a layered .psd template of just the tag shapes in case you want a different color scheme. Download by clicking on the image.

Do stop by Anelia’s site and look at all the cute kits she’s got, I’ve already got a couple on my wish list!  I think anyone could find good use for the Celebration kit, and I know my teenage daughter is going to want Bits of Wonderland.  And her Halloween kit Scrap-a-boo is exactly my favorite colors, so that’ll have to be mine before next year!

Hope you’ve got your shopping done, and can put these tags to good use!
Jenn

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One of my goals for the new year is to do more design work – drawing or creating scrapbooking elements, type effects, ribbons ,bows – all kinds of stuff. So I’ve been following a lot of tutorials around the Internet and came across this great one on how to do gold type. It’s a perfect gift from me to you for the holiday!

Download Scrappers Workshop Gold Text Layer Style

Here’s how to use it:

- Create a new document in Photoshop or Elements
- Select your type tool (keyboard short cut “T”) and select a font. You want a bold, large, plainly seen font.
Click your type tool in your document and type your word or words.
Duplicate the type layer you just created. (Easiest way is to hit Ctrl-J or drag your layer to the layer duplication icon.)

Apply the SW_Gold_top_layer to the top type layer.
Apply the SW_gold_bottom_layer to the bottom layer.

And that’s it! If you have Photoshop, you can scale the effects to fit the size type you need.

So now the tricky part – how to you load the layer style to use it?
In Photoshop (it’s easy) – Go to Window – Styles to open the Style window. Click the upper right corner to the Styles window and select Load Styles. Navigate to where you unzipped the Gold_text_Scrappers_workshop.asl file and click Load.
In Elements (it’s tricky!) – see this great tutorial at Scrapper’s Guide or drop us an email and we’ll help. (We’ve included the correct metadata file so you don’t have to create it yourself!)

As I learn more techniques I’ll be sharing them so make sure you are subscribed to our blog so you don’t miss any.

Happy Holidays!

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Tonight’s crop was small but fun!  I’ve had a really crazy couple of weeks, and ran out of time to do a post BEFORE the crop, so I’m posting now!

This week we have a brand new tutorial on how to use the GRID function in Photoshop and Photoshop Elements to create a color-blocked layout quickly and easily. Don’t forget to click on the link in the forum post to get your freebie color-block templates!!

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