A NEW YEAR BEGINS . . .

Sincerely wishing all of you the best life can bring your way in 2010. As all can see from this poor blog, I've been MIA for quite some time. Those that know us personally are aware that we unexpectedly suffered the loss of my 37 year old daughter on August 20th. Life must go on for those remaining, but it will never be the same. After all the months that have passed, I am only beginning to look beyond my own grief to try to address the living. I have lost others in my life before, but the loss of one's own child is certainly the most devastating of all. I welcome any thoughts and words of wisdom and encouragement from those who stop by here. I certainly have not felt very creative nor chatty, but I realize I must struggle to focus on things I used to enjoy and use them as a lifeline to regain sanity; else I will surely drown in my own sorrow. Left behind is my angel's son who will be 4 years old on January 25th. He was the extremely premature birth baby of 24 weeks gestation weighing 1 pound 8 ounces. Never did it occur to us while he grew lungs for 6 months in an incubator that his mommy would not get to see him mature into a man. She had never left his side, and he was surely her pride and joy. I have not felt like scrapping because it's been extremely hard to look at and work with pictures which always was so fun, depicting life, living, happy occasions, etc. I've tried to recently take a different approach by working with things that don't require me to handle photos yet, such as making Quick Pages, designing elements, papers, and such just to get me going again. I do feel that since my grandson is so very young, he will have only sketchy memories of his mom, if any. I feel that my biggest scrapping job is ahead of me and is more important than ever now. I must do a good job scrapping up all of my daughter's life so I can help keep her memory alive in her son and so he will be able to know who his mother was when he becomes a man. My digi-scrap objective had always been to leave beauty and organization for posterity, and now it holds even a deeper, more valuable reason to succeed with that task.

I hope you will travel with me as I work my way back from tragedy to some form of reality. I have missed communicating with my online friends in the months gone by. I had been so enjoying doing CT work for several designers, so I may gradually find my way back to doing something similar. I have thought about digging in with some online design classes to busy my mind. I would like to pursue getting into designing templates. Santa kindly left me PhotoShop Elements 8 under the tree to try to spur me on. Sweet, huh? It's the one from Costco that has the great tutorial CD by Linda of Scrapper's Guide. I should open it and get it installed, right?

First, it's imperative that I make some hard drive room. I'm down to 22 gigs of space left. I'm slowly transferring files to a neat 500 gig pocket drive. What a neat device! It's so slim and small, truly fits in one's pocket. My computer's box just happened to have a pocket bay, and I know hubby didn't realize all that when he picked it up for me. That day was done in a hurry, and we weren't even together shopping. I'm always the victim of mechanical computer crashes or failure because I never turn the thing off to rest or cool down. It literally runs from the day I get it until the day it decides to die. Then it's simply replaced within about 24 hours of death. I have even gotten to the point now that I am ready for this, anticipating it ahead. I kept my last tower since it suffered a mechanical failure of the hard drive itself, and I have it for a spare that I will simply buy a hard drive for when my present puter croaks.

I'm rambling off. Back to topic, my digi plans will consist of hanging out in some forums and beginning to try some of their challenges to get myself back into focus with the scrapping. I did some handwork, crochet, of small items for Christmas gifts for my neighbors who were so supportive in August and for some family members. I found the concentrated handwork helped my mind stay busy preholiday, which was good as the holidays were hard to get through this year from turkey day on. In doing that I also discovered something I could identify with. I was using a pattern in a new booklet by Drew Emborsky, "The Crochet Dude", and found that his mom had taught him the craft, and when she died Drew got very deep into it while dealing with his grief. Do look where crochet has taken him. He is all over TV, travels with is hooks and yarns, and everybody knows him. There was a very enlightening dedication in the front of his pattern book I was using. Check out his website at http://www.thecrochetdude.com/ if you like needle arts.

And now I have a FREEBIE for you! This is a photo mat, sometimes called a "clipping mask", and they are really neat and fun to use. I've learned to make them, so I'll be passing a lot of them on to you. It was designed in my PSE6 and is saved as a png. I'm not sure that all scrapping software programs have the "clipping mask" capability, but I know that PhotoShop Elements does, and the technique is very simple. Here is a simplistic sample layout to show you what a photo looks like when "clipped" to the mat/mask. Notice how the ocean portion at the top of this photo is up in the word "Ethan".

That's the correct way to use these mats. However, I'm sure there are a lot of other things you can do with it also in different scrapping programs. Your freebie today is called "Snowbound" and is in keeping with the current nationwide weather conditions most everywhere! Thought it just might be useful for some snow shots you just took recently! Here's the preview:

DOWNLOAD HERE

Leave me some comments if you like this, and I have lots more of them to come, so stop back by. I'm also open to suggestions if you have anything you would particularly want me to make just for your needs.

Thanks for letting me ramble back into blog-land. Have patience as I attempt to screw my head back on and march forward.

Tootles!