Raggedy Christmas

Christmas is almost here!!!   

Ginger over at Ginger's Scraps N Pixels has a new kit for us to play with.  It's called "Raggedy Christmas" and it's found on: http://www.godigitalscrapbooking.com/shop/index.php?main_page=product_dnld_info&cPath=29_272&products_id=16486

I don't have any Raggedy Ann or Andy dolls, but I have some books.  I used one of the collage templates from the MyMemories software, inserted the some of the books in place of photos, and also included some illustrations. I made a cluster from the beautiful flowers in the Raggedy Christmas kit, and finished it with Raggedy embellishments.

  

Had a really fun photo of my dear, deer daughter.  I don't know which embellishment I like better, the deer or the kitty!

Mystic Orient

Thanksgiving and Black Friday are a memory.  I'm sitting here thinking of some of the things I'm thankful for. One of the many things I'm thankful for is our youngest child, Aurora, and the great adventure we had on the road to adoption.  Rori was born in China and it was really wonderful getting to visit her beautiful birth country.  I made these layouts using a kit called, "Mystic Orient" by Ginger Scraps N Pixels.  You can find her store at: http://www.godigitalscrapbooking.com...cturers_id=124 

Wow!  It was cold in Beijing!  The Great Wall is so high, the temperature was below freezing and the wind made it even colder.  Look at the photo of the steps.  Did you realize the steps on the Great Wall were so steep?  That's the view from the top of one set of steps. They go straight down! Hold that handrail!

 

The Temple of Heaven Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests was really interesting.  When you stand at the center of the Temple and speak (As the Emperor did) every person in the crowd can hear you. Even so much as a whisper can be heard. Folks thought the Emperor was magic! 

We saw so much and learned so much during our trip to China.  But the best thing that happened to us in China was meeting and adopting Aurora. Aren't these elements just perfect?  I love this peacock!

Free MyMemories Software!!!

Big surprise for y'all today! MyMemories has given me permission to give away MyMemories 4 software for FREE!!!!  Yup! You heard it! FREE!!!  You have until October 20th to get the free download.  If you want the discs, you'll have to pay for those, but if you want the software, go to: http://www.mymemories.com and then click on "software," then "MyMemories Suite," then under "Buy it now" click "Download Software" and "Add to cart." Then under "Enter Coupon/Promo Code" put in FreeTreatEE22. Then proceed to checkout. Download your software and enjoy!

The software comes prepackaged with some embellishments and papers to start you out. MyMemories also has lots of freebie quickpages and layouts for you to give a try. And they have tons of free tutorials. You will love this software, I promise you!

Treats, No Tricks

GingerSnaps and Pixels has been really going crazy with creativity!  First Ginger was in a series of contests and then came out with this really fun kit: Treats, no Tricks on
 http://gingersscrapsnpixels.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=67&products_id=50

 

I love the alphas in this kit.  To make the letters pop and the kids stand out, I added a triangle of a more plain background.  Don't you love the bat paper? The little bat element just makes me smile.

More fun alphas, but this is Word Art in the kit.  I loved all the candy background paper and elements I couldn't read the word art against the candy corn background, so I added the rectangle of the white backed candy paper.  I added a mat around it to make it stand out more.

Ding! Ding!

You scream, we scream, we all scream for ice cream!  Perfect kit for summer days and days of popsicles and ice cream cones.

This kit has lots of options for your favorite Ice Cream treat.

I love the ice cream truck!

Oh! How I love peanut butter sauce! 

This kit has so much, flowers, leaves, kids, cones, and this adorable ice cream parlor!

Ding Ding Ice Cream is the daily download kit on Ginger's Scraps & Pixels blog found on http://gingersscrapsnpixels.blogspot.com/

Garden of Gnome

Talk about a fun kit!  I just love this one! We just had Aurora's Senior pictures done and I thought it would be perfect to cut out the background and sit her down on the park bench from the kit.

Since I had so much fun removing the background from the fist pic, I thought it might be fun to have Luke growing out of a pot on the second layout.

Two more senior pics. I love all the flowers in this kit!

Here's a preview of the kit and you can pick it up at 

http://gingersscrapsnpixels.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=76&products_id=35

Dandelion Dreams and Le Vie en Rose

CatDesignz has given us two new kits that are just beautiful!

These two were made with "Dandelion Dreams."  I love the wings! Now Luke can be the angel he is!

The kit is found on MyMemories at 

http://www.mymemories.com/store/display_product_page?id=CDCR-CP-1308-38811

and the second kit is La Vie en Rose

I love all the flowers!  It's got lots of little tags like "B = Beautiful," 

but I thought "A - Adorable" was perfect for this page

I also picked "A - Adorable" for this page because her name starts with "A."  I changed the photo to a sepia tone, because I thought it would make the flowers pop. You can find La Vie en Rose on 

http://www.mymemories.com/store/display_product_page?id=CDCR-CP-1308-38978

and it's on sale for $2.99 through 8/24/13.

Science Class 101, My Lil Artist and a Freebie!

Ginger Scraps N Pixels gave us two new kits to play with. Here are my layouts for Science Class 101:

I had so much fun making this cluster.  I especially like how Ginger had a lot of scientists in the kit and one of them looked like my daughter.  All the beakers and test tubes and such really brought the cluster to life.

I love this photo of my daughter and her beau.  They have such great chemistry together. Don't you love all the flowers?  I love a kit with lots of flowers and leaves. The alphabet bow brings school to mind, but it's not so juvenile that you can't use it for a layout involving teens.

Here's the kit preview. It doesn't show everything in the kit. There is a ton of stuff in this kit! 

Click on the kit to go to Ginger's Blog.

And now I'm going to attempt to do something I've never done before!  I've made a cluster and I'm going to try to give it to you.  Click on this cluster and it's supposed to download for you.  Try it out and let me know if it works or not.  

The next kit was "My Lil Artist."  My grandson is only 2, but does that boy love to draw and color and scribble and have a blast!  Don't you love this background paper with all the markers?  I love the way the flower has polka-dots that echo in the mat around the photos.

Another huge cluster! Oh!  How I love to make clusters!!! And there are so many choices with this kit: crayons, paint, markers, brushes and palette... and a cute lil artist!

Look at all these elements.  She ain't stingy!

Click on the kit to go to Ginger's Blog.

Fruitful Enterprise

Raspberry Road always has lovely fruits and foods to use in my layouts. Isn't this just perfect for the Watermelon Festival?   I especially loved the Watermelon Alphas.  You can find the kit and some fantastic freebie clusters on: 

http://raspberryroaddesigns.blogspot.ca/search/label/Watermelon

I really loved the plaids I made on the alphas in the next layout.  I just chose a really fat font and filled it with a plaid paper. FUN! My grandson really loved the corkscrew slide and I loved the flow from one pic to the next.  It took a while to find a graphic of the corkscrew slide and I finally found it on: http://www.mymemories.com/store/product_search?term=Playground+EquipmentZ

Two New Kits & links to Freebies

I'm really loving being on Creative Teams.  Ginger's Scraps N Pixels has two kits out today and as part of her team, I got the kits early and got to make some layouts.  Love this kit! It's called "Celebrate With Me." It's so much fun!!!

Don't you just love the colors? Here's what the whole kit looks like.  Tons of elements and adorable backgrounds.  As you can see, even the word art is fun!

 to CELEBRATE, she's got all this going on:

Click here to go to Ginger's store

The second kit is called "Home Tweet Home." Gorgeous shades of blue and adorable little birds made this kit a real joy to work with,

Here's what the kit looks like:

It's HUGE! You are going to love it!

You can get this kit Here!

Getting Started with Digital Scrapbooking

I've had so much fun with digital scrapbooking I thought I'd share with you. I tried making layouts using Photoshop, but it was a little complicated for me. I found this page on Facebook called MyMemories. I lurked for a while and thought maybe I would give the software a try. Everyone said it was really easy, so I decided I was going to "bite the bullet" and buy the software. It was $40, but a friend gave me a code to use to get $10 off the software, plus $10 to spend in the shop mymemories.com. I figured that was like half price, and I'm a real bargain hunter, so maybe this would be the thing for me.

First, I went to the website and took a look around. They had all these free kits you could download, whether you had a PC or a Mac. Plus, if you choose not to buy the software, you could download them as "General" files and use them in Photoshop. Well, what's better than free? Then I looked at the Dollar Store. So many kits for $1!! Wow! You get the papers and embellishments with some of these kits - for $1. Loving that.

Downloading the software was easy and so was downloading the kits. Once I got the software installed, I opened up the file for one of the kits, and it automatically downloaded to my Applications folder. Cool Beans! I decided to try one of the "Quick Pages." The designer puts together everything but the photo. I have SO MANY photos I need to get scrapbooked! Holy cow! It was so easy! And it looked really professional. I really liked it, so I decided to try a page using the kit and make it up myself. Not super good, not super bad. I uploaded a jpg of the page to the MyMemories facebook page and asked for critique. A lady said it would look better with "shadows" so I gave that a try. What a difference! It looked like all the photos and embellishments jumped off the page!

I am having so much fun with this! If you think you might want the software, I'm going to do for you what my friend did for me. If you buy the software, when it asks for a Promo Code, cut and paste this:

STMMMS31635

It's best to cut and paste so your get all the letters and numbers correct. That will get you $10 off the software and the software will come with a coupon for $10 any purchase in the store.

If you decide to give it a try, let me know. I'd love to share pages and tips with you. If you decide not to get the software and continue to use Photoshop or something like that, also let me know. I'd love to swap ideas!

July 4th kits

Hope y'all had a great Independence Day!  I've been playing all day with two new kits from Ginger's Scraps & Pixels. The first kit, she's giving away a download a day, It's called "Let Freedom Ring" and you can find the daily downloads at: http://www.gingersscrapsnpixels.blogspot.com/

Here's what the kit looks like:

And here are my layouts:

Be sure to go to Ginger's Facebook page and "like" it.  As soon as she has 250 likes, she's giving away a free mini-kit.  Her facebook page it on: https://www.facebook.com/GingerHewettPhotography

Ginger also put out a new kit called "For Those Who Served" and here's a look at that kit:

I made these pages from this one:

Playing around with GingerScraps kits

This first kit is called "Bear A Trooper" and it is adorable.  I've never jumped out of a plane, and the only paratrooper I know retired years ago, so I don't have any photos like that. Then I remembered one of my favorite Contemporary Christian songs by Nicole Nordeman, "What If?" There is a passage that goes:

What if you jump?

And just close your eyes?

What if the arms that catch you, catch you by surprise?

What if He's more than enough?

What if it's love?

It's a song about giving your life to Christ. So I thought, what about a layout of my daughter's baptism?

My niece is learning to fly planes.  She sent me some photos and I made this layout.

With all the lovely bears in this kit, I took it in another direction and made this one about camping.  The background is the kit's brown paper, with one of my photos laid on top and then I turned down the opaqueness and got this:

Bear-A-Trooper can be found on Ginger's Scraps N Pixels

The next three are from a kit called "Fishin'" and it can be found on Ginger's blog at

http://gingersscrapsnpixels.blogspot.com/2013/06/daily-download-24-new-release-fishin-at.html