Simply My Digital Studio Challenge: Frames with a twist

I have to say, this photo of Tom is one of my favourites. And it's just a quick snapshot of him at Starbucks. He just happened to look outside and the light from the window lighted his face perfectly. Okay, I did edit it in my Camera+ app quite a lot. I think I used the Ansel set up and some vignette edits on this too.

the challenge on this one was to use frames, but not in your typical way - framing pictures. I did use a mat under my picture and some embellishments but my frames are more around the sentiment and at the background. 

The stitching frame is actually 2 L-shaped stitches, one is just flipped around and then overlapped with the other.

Why don't you give your smartphone a run for it's money and snap some pictures? Try some non-conventional edits on them too. the nice thing about digital editing is that you still keep your original image, in case your editing doesn't work. And you know how easy it is always to use the same edits? why not try something totally different - like a purple haze? or download a new photo editing app and give them a try. I only have 16 on my iPhone :-)

and remember, who's stopping you from editing the photo in several different apps?? Let's face it, some of them have better frames, some of them have better picture editing tools. So give them a try! 

Simply My Digital Studio Challenge: Using stamps

It's been awhile since I last created some digital pages. I have done couple of newsletters and a new blogheader (I just LOVE the colours on this one!!!), but no proper pages. My PC was constantly crashing when dealing with large sized items, so I had to keep things simple.

Now with my new MacBook, I'm again good to go....

(as long as I can figure out all the new commands and this North American keyboard... dots in odd places, and where in the world are all the /@«\÷æ‘…¬ symbols....

So, so far I have created two pages, both for the "Simply My Digital Studio" Facebook group challenges.

This first one is a challenge to use stamps. No embellishments here. Just stamps.

The background is created with an ampersand stamp, which I coloured Bermuda Bay. Then each vertical row was done in different opacity to create the gradual change in the colour.

I used a whisper white background card stock to get the opacity right

I have to say, using stamps is not the easiest thing for me. I tend to veer towards embellishments - I guess they are just easier :-)

I hope you like this and my next page. I will be posting more digital creations during the next 5 months, but don't you worry, I am bringing with me enough 'real paper' to create you traditional cards too. 

I hope you get inspired with both - remember, you can get inspiration from digital work for your paper crafting too - and why not give My Digital Studio a try?? After all, it is free for the first 30 days. 

don't think of it just as a scrapbooking tool. You can create cards, business cards for you or your family, blogheaders, Facebook headers and add embellishments to your photos. So really, it's a very multifunctional program.

Enjoy!

while waiting for the spring weather...

I love winter, but I think it's time to change the weather pattern - eh?

 

We went to Sudbury (ON) for 4 days to visit Tom's parents and got dumped with 15cm of snow on Sunday. But we did get some sunny weather too, as you can see from these pictures - taken at the Big Nickle

 

So while we wait for the snow to melt (and hope that the forecasts for more snow are not true), I decided to create a card using two of my TOP 10 stamp sets: "Happy Watercolor" and "Petite Petals". I'm not really sure if I truly could narrow my favourite stamp sets into 10, but right NOW these two will surely fit that category :-)

The card base is Blushing Bride and I stamped the Happy Watercolour "blob" with various neutrals:

Sahara Sand, Crumb Cake, Baked Brown Sugar and Soft Suede. I stamped the image first on a piece of scrap paper and then on card stock. Then I stamped the Petite petals with various different pinks: Pink Pirouette, Blushing Bride, Rose Red, Calypso Coral and Strawberry Slush.

 

Then I thought it needed some bling and I added 3 golden sequins

 

 

What the fox says.... ring-ding-ding-ding-dinga-dinga-ding....

When I first saw the "Life in the Forest" stamp, I thought it to be cute, but not for me. Then I saw couple of cards made with it - and I was sold. There were 2 Stampin'Up! demonstrators, who inspired this card: Nancy Smith, with her question mark (she had an envelope, the mouse from the same stamp set says "Mouse goes Squeek" and THAT was an AHA-moment for me. I knew I had to get this set.

 

The trees and the mushrooms are from the same set. The trees were stamped on a Gumball Green Epic Day Designer Series Paper and the mushrooms were coloured with Real Red marker (stamped on Whisper White).

And then I remembered another product, that would make this perfect - our TALKING TAGs!!! I was not sure if it would work - after all, I was not planning on singing that song myself.

So I loaded it on my iTunes and played it with my computer while recording the sound with my iPhone. Well.. the sound quality is not the best, but works for me :-)

The other demonstrator, Linda Heller, had the best fox - I saw plenty of foxes coloured with markers or blenderpens - but Linda had actually stamped the fox on Tangerine Tango and Whisper white card stocks. Then she cut the full fox out of Tangerine Tango and cut the face mask and the tail from the Whisper White fox and glued those on top of the Tangerine Tango fox. She then coloured the ears with White gel pen. - PERFECT!!!

So here is a picture of my talking tag - I tested it, and if you download the app "TalkingTag.mobi" on your smart phone, you can listen to my 60 sec of Yelvis and Fox :-)

double embossing - not that easy...

I have seen these double embossing cards a lot. Never tried them myself though.

Well, it wasn't as easy as I thought and I was not able to smoothen out the first embossing

I still think the card is pretty, but I had hoped that the second embossing would have smoothened the first out a bit more.

So what I did was:
1. stamp the images and coloured the flower.
2. embossed the whole base
3 embossed the frame around the flower using a cardboard shim (google video's on this)

the cardboard shim was supposed to smoothen the first embossing  - well... didn't work for me and my BigShot - I'm not giving up though - I will figure this out - one day :-)

Spring must be here - butterflies keep appearing on my cards...

This card is an inspiration from several other demonstrators. The inside is the WOW part and that was inspired by Debbie Blake and Rachel Wellard.

Rachel had used thie Spiral Flower die with white card stock inside a card where as Debbie had used the clear window sheets inside a glass dome. So I combined those two. I used the Spiral Flower die with window sheets and adhered it inside the card.

Now since it is a bit harder to get that window sheet to stick - I adhered it with brads to make sure it stays put. I just made sure the brads were hidden at the front by a butterfly and at the back with the backing cardstock.



The butterflies are done with the two different sized punches and with the Beautiful Wings Embosslits.

So when you open the card, it seems like the butterflies are flying inbetween the card - pretty - eh?

Vintage post card

Seems to be a vintage week for me...

 

I used to do a lot of these type cards, multiple layers, not lined evenly and edges roughed and inked. I haven't done those in a long while but I see them all the time on the Stampin'Connection so I figured, what better stamp to use on this than the Post Card background stamp.

The colours on this card are Pool Party, Crumb Cake, Wild Wasabi and Very Vanilla.

I masked the stamped post card image but left a little cut out on the left side and stamped over it with En Francais stamp. Then I used the Field Flowers and Butterflies stamp sets to create the images.