FREE TEMPLATE - BACK TO SCHOOL

Good Morning, my Lovelies! I spent yesterday wrapped up in "Back To School" challenges which just got posted over at Digital Scrapbooking Studio, and they run from now until the end of August. One of them is a template challenge, and I couldn't resist making one. Since I did, you get it as a freebie! If you want more, you'll have to visit the "Back To School" forum threads and hunt for the download links in each participant's post.  Toward the end of this month will be a good time to check that out since there will be more posted by then.  The challenges are so new in fact, that I haven't  had time to make a layout with the template I just designed myself.  If I get one done, I'll come back and insert it for you to see.  Main thing is, snag my template!  In my download, I've included a psd, tiff, and PNGs; so it should be useful to most scrapping software programs.  It's pretty basic, but you can dress it up with lots of goodies from your own stash!  Here is the preview, and download links are below that.

DOWNLOAD HERE or HERE

There are some neat free supplies and mini kits to gather up in these "Back To School" challenges; so, if you are a collector of goodies like I am, you won't want to miss visiting the forum to scoop them up!  If you are not registered there, it simply takes your email and a password of your own choosing to get registered.  Hop on over there and have some fun!  It doesn't matter if you have kids, grand-kids, or graduates; there is something for everyone!

Leave some love if you download, and stop back by real soon.  I'll have more goodies coming your way!

TOOTLES!!

FREEBIE - VACATION 2015 FRAME TRIO

Good Morning, Peeps! I'm rolling out the freebies so you'll have new digi-scrap supplies to play with while your kids are sitting in class this fall! You'll want to scrap up your vacation shots from this year, no matter what time of year the vacation was; so I made a couple of different styles for you to use. These are high resolution, 300 dpi, png format images. They can easily be sized larger or smaller. They can be recolored, used as clipping masks for your papers, or you can apply styles to them. As you can see, I used a corrugated cardboard style that I made in an online class tutorial on one of them for you. They are without shadows so you can add your own to your liking. Below is a preview, and download links are below that.

 
DOWNLOAD HERE OR HERE

I hope you like them and can use in your digi-scrapped pages!  Leave me some love if you download. Thanks for stopping by, and I'll be back again soon with more goodies!

I'm going to be working on another album for myself of last fall's vacation that hubby and I took to a lovely winery in the Virginia Highlands. I have a zillion photos of it and have only managed to scrap one page so far. Pitiful, really! It was such a pleasant, relaxing type of vacation; and I am finding myself looking forward to more of that type of trip, just us and the dog to a peaceful setting we haven't been to before. We stayed in a very old two story farmhouse on gorgeous land with a cabin and a fishing pond now run as a Bed & Breakfast. The winery we visited had a beach music festival going on the weekend that we attended, and the grounds were full of arts and crafts for sale as well. We enjoyed several wine tastings, the music, the food vendors, the crafts, the surrounding area of small town artsy type shopping complete with bakeries. I met several jewelry designers there selling their designs, and that is another hobby of mine; so I was in heaven with all the inspiration. Our B&B hosts were just incredible, and we made good friends of them. I know we will return there in the future. This time of year has me thinking and remembering how wonderful it was. It's an album I will enjoy putting together. I found some great wine themed kits over at Ginger Scraps. If you haven't visited their site, you are missing out on one of the BEST and MOST GENEROUS websites on the net for supplies and friendly folks. It's a site I totally fell in love with and visit it every day, several times a day! I participate in most all the monthly challenges there, visit all the designers' blogs and Facebook pages, and just enjoy the whole environment there!! This is one time you will want to take my advice and check them out! Promise!!

TOOTLES!!

FREE PRINTABLE CARD - TODAY'S THOUGHT

As promised, I'm back this morning with an older free printable card from last summer that I forgot to post. Life can get hectic, and some things will just slip through the cracks at times. Lucky that I found this hanging out in my online storage accounts and was able to see that it had not been downloaded by anyone. That made me investigate it a little further, thus, realizing it had never been posted here to the blog. It is just the card front, so when you set it up to print, remember to place it so you will have the same size space to the left so you will be able to fold it in the middle for use. It is in jpg format, and I believe it is 5.5 inches wide by 8.5 inches long.

Here is the preview and download links below that,

DOWNLOAD HERE or HERE

And that's a little piece of scholarly wisdom for you! Thanks for stopping by! I'll be back again soon! Our children go back to school this Thursday, then comes the Labor Day holiday, and then my beach will be a lot quieter for the Fall season.

TOOTLES!!

FREE PRINTABLE CARD - BEAUTY OF NATURE

Good Morning! I took part in another monthly challenge over at Ivy Scraps, this time the greeting card challenge. I'd like to do it every month but can't seem to find enough time. I worked fairly hard on this one because I decided to use a photo of my own flower in it, but I didn't want the photo's background colors to detract from the background paper. I made a desaturated copy of the photo, and then played for a long time popping that yellow flower blossom back in. Whew! Just time consuming. I have not played with that technique for a long time! The high resolution of this is in jpg format at 8.5 x 11" so you can print it right on your home printer on white or ivory card stock, glossy, semi-glossy, or matte photo paper, etc. Set your printer to print full page (or to the border, if you have that kind of option). After printing, simply score the card down the middle and fold.  The back has been left white, and the inside is blank so you can write a note or short letter of your own in there. Hope you can use and enjoy this! I will be back tomorrow with another printable card for you that I made last summer and forgot to post. I ran into it hanging out in my online storage accounts ready to go, but it never got posted. Look for it tomorrow!

The print on the card is black outlined in white and reads, "The Beauty of Nature Is Just Outside Your Door!" It's difficult to see it here, but it is quite pretty at full size.

Here is the preview of today's freebie printable card with download links below that,

DOWNLOAD HERE or HERE

That's all for today!  Thanks for stopping by!

TOOTLES!!

FREEBIE QUICK PAGE - BETH

Happy middle of August, folks!  We are still packing in the last of summer fun. Our kids here at the beach return to school on the 24th, not so far away now. I know, lots everywhere are already back in session. I feel for the little rascals, it's still so hot; and, when I was young, the summers seemed to last for eternity.

Will attempt to keep this post short for you. My FREEBIE QP for you today has a crafty sewing theme and comes from a kit called "Beth" by A-M Designs by way of my participation in the monthly QP contest over at Ivy Scraps. Again, if you would like to collect pages from all the monthly participants, simply visit the forum there, go under the monthly challenge thread to the August Quick Page Contest thread (you may need to register before you can see everything, and I have changed my link to go directly to the forum). There you will find each participant will post a direct link to their FREE QP, and you can collect enough to have a nice ready-made album. We normally work in a 12x12" page size, png format at 300 dpi. However, if you like a smaller page, these will size down to a nice 8x8" which you can then home print. It always amazes me that we are all given the same mini kit to work with; but, by the end of the month there are always so many vastly different designed pages to download! It's a lot of pure fun if you like to play with digital things on your computer!

Below is a preview of the kit, then a sample layout I made using photos from a friend's summer sewing project she just finished, and then a preview of my blank Quick Page.  The download links are below that.

  

Isn't her sewing project spectacular?!!

DOWNLOAD HERE or HERE

I provide two options for downloading sites so we don't run into "out of bandwidth" problems.  If you can't get it from one site, you can probably get it from the other.

I believe I am finished scrapping pages for my June vacation album; ended up with 60-some which are now posted under the "layouts" tab above. I also worked on another summer album which I am going to post there soon, and it is of two teenage ladies that came to visit my daughter here at the beach for a week in June. My daughter is the ultimate fun hostess, and these two gals are drop dead gorgeous and live back up north where we all migrated from originally. I wanted to do something special for their mom, who stayed home to work her job while her girls ran off to the beach to have fun with their "Fairy Beach Godmother" (my daughter). They ran so hard having adventures here everyday, and I certainly couldn't keep up with them. However, it dawned on me that I had easy access to all the photos of the fun, so I made their mom a scrapbook. My only concern will be that one day the girls may fight over who gets the album, so I have figured that problem out also. I will supply them each with a cd of all the pages, both in high-resolution and web images. Problem solved!

Okay, I promised a short post, so I'll stop here. I've been back into designing a little bit, so watch for some cool things to come here. I made a neat vacation frame/mask and some cool doodles, so I'll have those ready soon as well as some templates for you.

Thanks for stopping by and especially to anyone who takes the few seconds to let me know you were here!

TOOTLES!! 

THREE FREE PAPER PACKS - BUTTERCUP RAYS 1, 2 & 3

Happy 1st day of AUGUST, everyone! Wow! Can you believe how fast the summer is flying away?! Some of you, no doubt, look forward to the return of the school bell and schedule; then others do not. Those that have children are busy gathering in the supplies, freshening up the little munchkins' wardrobes, and packing in the last bit of the family fun for the summer season. Here at the beach we will have more tourists during the month of August than we had as school let out in June. We that live here have to be extremely cautious while just driving to do our daily chores for the tourists get caught up in gazing at the sites we take for granted and do not know our roads as well. One more last holiday at the front of September, and all will quieten down!

I've been purging files on my four internal hard drives to free up room for more digi goodness!  I want to pass on a helpful tip I recently discovered quite by accident on a digi instructional site I visited. Some of us save psd files, some save our work as tiff files, and some save both types. I always read in forums of people complaining that tiff files take up too much room and were larger than their psd files. If that's the case on your computer, something is wrong with the way you are saving them, or the person you downloaded from did not know this tip either. Believe me, I have found an extreme number of boo-boos in my own stash, including my own. I am pretty much self-taught from the get-go, then did take some classes to help me learn my software and techniques, but nobody covered this handy tip. Your saved tiff file should always be smaller in size than your original psd file. There's a way to adjust your "save tiff" settings to make sure of this.  It works every time! I had it wrong, was doing it wrong, and I've been scrapping since 2008. So imagine how many files I can fix now the right way and free up valuable room!! Here is an image that shows the correct settings to get a quality layered tiff file in the smallest finished size . . .

I hope you can see that clearly enough to copy it or save it for your own knowledge!! Valuable thing to know!!

Allrighty then, I don't want to talk your ears off today, so I'll jump right into today's FREEBIE. I was in a creative mood after all the page scrapping I've done lately, so I made some papers for you. I ran across some old but wonderful overlays as I was purging files, so I had to stop and play. I found a beautiful color in my PSE which I chose to work with and call "Buttercup" in its original state. As I added overlays and played with the blend modes, colors began to change a bit. However, this is a great color for summer backgrounds and can also be carried into fall harvest themes, etc. I hope you'll find it useful. As I worked, I developed three slightly different sets of the same three patterns I was using, so I am going to upload all 3 sets for you to snag. I recommend downloading all of them, and I've named the papers so that you can put them all in the same folder and they will fall automatically into place. At that point, you'll be able to see the texture differences if you have a good eye. You may not be able to see the differences here; but, trust me, each set has subtle variations. You'll want them all. These are all jpg format, 12x12", 300 dpi. Here we go with previews and download links below each set: This is Version 1, Grunged & Plain,

DOWNLOAD HERE or HERE

This is Version 2, Grunged & Plain with Texture,

DOWNLOAD HERE or HERE

And last is Version 3, Grunged & Plain, with Texture and Wrinkles,

DOWNLOAD HERE or HERE

Please leave me some love if you like freebies and download, otherwise I never know you were here and am not inspired to make free goodies for your stash. Rather I could offer my work through my Etsy store. A simple "thanks" goes a long way in a person's mind.

That's all for today, peeps!

Have a great last month of summer vacation ya'll, and I'll see you back here very soon!

TOOTLES!!