Christmas Freebie Kit

Now is the time to start scrapping all those wonderful Christmas Eve and Christmas Day photos of all the madness with your kids and their new stuff.  Or you with your new stuff.  Go over to Hummies World, spend $7, and get a really neat Christmas kit for free.

I just downloaded mine and unzipped it and it is going to be perfect to scrap my grandkids Christmas photos with.  It is available for $6 but I got it free when I bought Kiki Cole's Candy Cane Lane Bundle.  It is a winner, too.  Watch my blog for layouts made with all the Christmas goodies in The Boomerang Store.  I love to be scraplifted.

Year in Review

Just the highlights, folks:

Also lots of remodeling, done by hubby in preparation to selling the house.  Hope to be living in Georgia by next year this time, hopefully in our brand new house.

Season of Joy Kit

Lee Benkers Designs celebrates the season with her new kit, Season of Joy, now in the store at Hummies' World. 

 

And while you are there, grab her journal cards, I used one for my Christmas card.

 



Now for some inspiration:

Nanscraps 

Kim

 

Lee

Chiara

 

Christmas Ornaments

Put up the Christmas tree yesterday.  Took some photos of some ornaments.  Scrapped them. 

Both layouts made with Andrea Gold's Holiday Splash kit from GoDigitalScrapbooking.com
I fell for the snowman!!!  And the teal and purples reeled me in. 

Joy

I love this old-fashioned Santa.  And the string of old fashioned style lights.  And that round Christmas ball like I used to have on my childhood tree.  I had to make something with them.

The list of designers and kits I drew from for this page are listed in my gallery.

Punch it Out

Digitally, I mean.  I learned something new today over in Hummies' World Classroom: How to punch shapes out of digi paper using the eraser tool.  I made my eraser from a firework shape provided by PSE and had some fun with it.

I put some artistic black paper over a photo we took at a 4th of July celebration and erased with the brush to reveal some of it.  Cool effect, I think.

December Desktop

Every month my digi friend Tammy designs a template to make a custom desktop background.  This month I finally took the plunge:

Want to make your own?  You can join the Hummies' World Challenge here.

Poetic

I love quotes and I love to make artsy layouts.  Recently on a trip to Auburn, I was walking up the hill just before dark to where we were staying, and the building was silhouetted against the sky and the crescent moon was gleaming.  It made me so happy (although Auburn FINALLY not being able to give their game away that day also had something to do with it) that I snapped a photo with my iphone.  The moon did not show up well in the pic, so I gave it some photoshop help.  The quote is from  Rabindranath Tagore,

To make the layout I used:

By The Light of the Moon Bloghop:

Jessica's Sweet Nothings: Blue Moon
Design by DeDe: Moonlit Dreamz

Bad Photo: Go Artsy!

I was doing my scraplift for the Scraplift Challenge over at Hummies' and had a vision of using a photo of my whole Christmas tree with a filmstrip of ornament photos.  I took these photos over the last two years, planning to scrap about each ornament in my collection.  Well, the only tree photo I had was horrid.  So I lifted it from the photo, plopped it onto green paper and started blending.  Here is the result:

Each of these ornaments in the filmstrip have a unique story.  The top nativity scene is plastic and is from my tree when I was growing up.  The ceramic Santa is a portrayal of old fashioned St. Nicholas from Germany and was bought while we lived there.  The little wooden angel was also purchased while in Germany.  The snowbaby at the bottom was in my Mom's Christmas decorations box.

I no hang all my ornaments on my tree; way too lazy now.  A few years back I discovered I had rather  inadvertently fallen into the habit of collecting angel and snowmen ornaments, so that is pretty much what I put on my tree, sort of a theme,  but I have not thrown away my other ornaments, and when I open the box each year, they are all shouting their stories at me.  Quite a noise.

Just Doodling

Did the Elements Challenge on Doodling at http://www.hummiesworld.com today and it was fun.  Found an old pic of Sawyer, searched for all my digi-doodles, and just piled them on!!!  I originally said it was Griff, but I knew better.  Thank you, children, for correcting your mother!!!  LOL

Buttons and Hinges

Trying to complete as many of my classes for December at Hummie's World.  Today was Elements Challenges:

Buttons:

 Hinges:

Saving a Photo

This photo was in a drawer somewhere:

It is a nice picture.  I especially thought Jason was adorable in that color blocked jacket.

With a little digi magic, I made it extra special.

How I did the photo: I put it on my PSE11 workspace, ran an effect on it called "old paper" that put an interesting b&w version on a new layer.  I erased parts of the new layer to get a colorful Jason back, plus our purple shadows and some of the golden tree leaves. 

Santa's Wonderland

My grandkids had the whole week of Thanksgiving off, so they went to College Park, Texas to visit Santa's Wonderland, a fantasy of lights.  They went on a Monday; no crowds!  He took some pictures and this is what I did with them.

SpeedScrap

What do you do when you are told to use 12 paper strips, a multiple opening frame, one photo in one opening, and blend another supporting photo into the background?  Here is what came from those instructions:

 Layout too small to read the journaling?  Double click on it and the LO should fill your screen.

I don't always follow instructions properly and misinterpreted one of the instructions, as usual.  I did blend the photo of myself into the background, but had it in the bottom left photo opening, which made no sense to me at the time.  Then when I peeked at the other scrappers' layouts, I realized my erroneous assumption.  Duh. So I simply reduced the saturation on the offending photo and made it a bit bigger.  Would have never thought to do it this way in just doing a layout on my own, but I do really like the effect of where it is, kind of on top of the plane.

I tend to do everything backwards....I have a sort of idea of my layout results and work backwards to attain it.  Exactly opposite of what I have to do in following a formula. 

The other scrappers did a fabulous job on their layouts.  You can see them all here in the SpeedScrap thread #15 at Hummie's World

And here is what our lovely Chiara had to say about all the layouts posted.  She summed them up perfectly:
".. Every single layout had something original and unique, so inspiring! For example the frame tilted, or the "secondary" photo blended on the focal-point-photo, the curved-at-the-end filmstrip, the circle photoframe, the very-big-photo blended on the paper, the paper strips with "adorable blessings"...I know I forgot something here, but ladies..you all did amazing pages with the speed crop ^__^"

Join in the activities at Hummie's World and join us for the next speed scrap.  

Filters are Fun

Photoshop Elements filters, that is.  Today I played with a photo Jenni had taken of a beach sunset.   Used the CutOut Filter on it, then make a brush  from a photo of a palm tree and stamped it.  Added a quote.  I love quotes.

Not Quite Winter

This is a beautiful kit, full of cool blues and winter whites.  I was so pleased when I saw it, so tired of all the autumn and halloween oranges and yellows.  Digiscrap kit releases are like any other retail business, it tends to follow the seasons.  I was so glad Lee chose to bring us a blast of cold air early. You can get it in Hummie's World Store now.

This is the layout I made with her new kit.  I was eager to scrap some snow, but had to cast way back in my picture files to find any, living now in North Carolina and all!  While in Germany we took the opportunity to visit the fabled Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria, built by King Ludwig.  He never actually lived in it, but built it to be quite a fairytale.  So much so that Disney's Cinderella Castle is modeled after it.  Talk about scraplifting!!

The photos you generally see of the castle are gorgeous; this photo is taken on an ordinary, bleak day in Bavaria.  This is how it REALLY looks, with a bit of editing magic on an old, faded photo.  And, of course, that is my sweet Jenni, always ready to pose for me.  It was cold and snowing and we were waiting in the parking lot to ride in a horse-drawn buggy up a very steep hill to take a tour of the inside of the castle.  Interesting inside, even with a grotto, but the outside has the best wow factor, in my opinion.  (The companion castle next door.....the one he lived in while building this one, was the basis for my spooky halloween layout in a previous post.  

Papa is Happy

Larry bought himself a new (ish) car.  He always buys the new (ish) one for me and takes the old one, so this is a FIRST.  It rides like a dream. 

Colors of Fall

Sunday was so pretty and warm, I got up from my computer, grabbed my nicer camera and walked around my cul-de-sac and my house.  Then I sat back down at the computer and made another photo walk layout.

You can also see it in my Gallery here, listing all the goodies I used making it.

Downtown Looking Up

I happened to be in uptown Charlotte walking to my car at around 5 pm.  The light on the skyscrapers was amazing and I began using my cellphone camera.  The reflections are something else!

Lee Benker's Designs Friday Freebie

Go grab this freebie on Lee's Blog. 

PhotoWalk This Weekend

This month's PhotoWalk is this weekend.  Grab your camera and go walk!

My daughter just sent my a bunch of pics she took on a beach walk in her new town, Vero Beach, FL.  I am going to scrap those!  Ok, ok, don't knitpick....I'll take some photos in my neighborhood, too, and make TWO layouts.  Happy?

The Dollar Store

I just love Dollar Stores.  Well, the Digi World has them, too.  Hummie's World put some of their best goodies into a $1 bin and that bin is still not empty.  It closes in just a few more days, so go grab a lot and spend a little.

Yummy Creamed Chicken

I don't recall ever making creamed chicken.  But I made it tonight.  I spotted it on somebody's blog and it really appealed to me, especially since I had a container of shredded rotisserie chicken.  I googled creamed chicken and chose the recipe from Bigredkitchen.com.  Mine was a little different because I also added some ground coriander, my go-to spice, and I used half soy milk. 

As I was cooking it, it was smelling absolutely wonderful, an aroma I could not identify.  It was delicious and I finally figured the aroma was a combination of the coriander and the soy milk, which I believe has vanilla in it.  Kind of a pastry/bakery aroma. Pure delight. I spooned it over a nice baked potato.

I topped it with lightly cook frozen green peas and garnish of cilantro, diced tomato, and diced cucumber.  I find that dicing some sort of fresh veggie for a garnish makes every meal taste better.

Google Friends?????

Yesterday I posted about a blog to visit to read about Feedburner and its possible future. The blogger today is talking about Google Friends and what Google seems to be doing. If you are a blogger using te Blogger platform, as I am, go read  this.  The web is constantly changing and it is so hard for me to keep up!!

Feedburner ???

I put the RSS button on my blog long ago.  I click on RSS feed button on blogs I want to follow.  Not really understanding it all.  I have GoogleFriends join button on my blog, too.  But then I read that GoogleFriends was defunct.  But all your  GoogleFriends blogs appear somewhere else now.  There are so many sources to follow blogs. I like to read the blogs I follow from my iPad so I need apps.   I like Flipboard, but can't always get a blog I follow onto it.  Yesterday I downloaded an app for feedburner. Now I read this interesting blog post from Hummie's World about Feedburner going away.  What will replace it?  Everything is becoming one big merry go round for me.  Things move too fast and one thing merges into another. I also have the subscribe to this post through email on my blog.  Feedburner manages that.  It is everywhere. 

I am sure I am not the only casual blogger out here in the blogosphere who barely understands all this. 

I learn a lot of things, not just about digitalscrapbooking on PSE at Hummie's World.  Here is her comments on Feedburner: November 5 Blog Post.  I found it very interesting.  Even if you are not a digiscrapper, you would enjoy getting her blog in your mailbox.  She blogs about a lot of interesting things. 

You Can Still Hop around Hummies' World

Hummies' Facebook Hop is still on.  Go grab all four parts and take a look at the great designers' pages.

Hummie's World

Lee Benkers Designs 

 Kiki Cole Designs 

BoBoBernie

 Here is the Layout I made with this kit:  It is a photo of my mom holding Jason.  We wanted a baby for a long time, and he was such a gift.

 

LBD Friday Freebie

Lee Benkers Designss puts up a free goodie every Friday on her blog.  To get this weeks, go to Lee Benkers Designs

I already got my copy.  Thanks, Lee

Digital Scrapbooking Day

Today, November 3, is Digital Scrapbooking Day.  All the Scrapbooking Stores on the web have sales and many of the specials will last for the week. There will be Blog Hops, Facebook Hops, designer collaborations, $1 bins, challenges, speedscraps, and chats. 

Hummie's World is joining in all the festivities with chats, speed scraps, $1 bin, a special collab, a Facebook Hop, and much more. Please include Hummie's World in your journey around the web today and the rest of the week.  Then keep on coming back!

Facebook Hop

You can start anywhere on this list and then keep on hopping and collect all four parts.

Kiki Cole Designs - Elements

Lee Benkers Designs - Papers

BoBoBernie - Bookmark

Hummie's World - Alpha


After you have gathered all the parts of the FB hop, come on to the store and grab some pretty stuff in the Dollar Bin

Stuffed your shopping bag full of the $1 items?  Don't forget to pick up the Adorable Beginnings Collab.  You need this kit if you are scrapping for a baby! 

Now that you have shopped til you drop, relax in the Chat Room for awhile.  You will learn all about selective coloring. (11 AM EST, 10 CST, 9 MST, 8 PST)

 Then hit the Speed Scrap tonight.  (9pm EST / 8pm CST / 7pm MST / 6pm PST)

Kiki Cole is hosting the speed scrap and it promises to be a lot of fun.

Kiki will  post a step every 10 minutes in the chat box and right here in the thread. Participants will get a frame cluster and an element cluster from an upcoming MEGA collection Kiki is making right now.






BoBoBernie is hosting a special challenge just for DSD.  Make a bookmark and upload it to the gallery and she will give you this bookmark she made especially for today.

While you are in the forum today, take a look at the sidebar to the left for a list of challenges going on at Hummie's World for the entire month.  Each challenge promises to be fun and you get prizes for participation.

So come for DSD and then make Hummie's World your home.  It is a friendly place to be.

Tip:  here is a link to DigiScrapTalk forum that lists many of the sales arouond the web today.