Digital Scrapbooking – Texture Overlays

Last night I was on someone's blog (see below) and she’s got various freebies to download, including some texture overlays, but rather than downloading these, I thought I'd try creating some myself. Whenever we go anywhere I'm always snapping away with the camera, and my hubby is always amused at the sort of things I take photos of – walls, pavements, different surfaces... I love textures and always photograph them, so I've got quite a library of them now. I opened one in my photo editor (Serif PhotoPlus – this software does 90% of what PhotoPlus does, but at a fraction of the cost) and increased the canvas size to make it the standard scrapbooking size of 12 x 12 in. and copied and pasted bits of the image to fill the space, to keep the pattern the same size. I then opened the channel mixer, and desaturated the image so it was greyscale, making sure it had good contrast – some adjustment was needed with the levels control. Then into the filters menu, where I chose Emboss, and adjusted the angle so it looked embossed rather than debossed (i.e. sticking out rather than sticking in!). I then exported it as an image saved on my hard drive. Into CraftArtist, where I put a nice plain-ish background in, and added this image on top. Using the Blending Mode, I chose Overlay. Hey presto! The two images are fused together, and the background has a nice texture on it!! I discovered you do need to use a background with a bit of colour, or the texture doesn’t show up.

This is the original photograph of a typical Norfolk chequerboard flintstone wall I photographed at Castle Acre Priory.

 

Here it is desaturated and embossed – this is what I saved as the texture overlay:

And here it is combined with a background.

Lovely effect, isn’t it! Here’s another one using a photo of some decorative stonework at Waddesdon Manor.

For this one, I made two texture overlays. You can change the angle of the simulated light source, and this gives a completely different effect.

This shows a bit more clearly on the next example. Here is the original photograph, of some crazed porcelain.

Just as you can produce either an embossed or a debossed effect with a Cuttlebug machine, depending on which side of the card you use, you can produce these effects by altering the angle of the virtual light source in the embossing effects tool in the photo editor. This is the embossed effect, i.e. the texture is raised:

and here is the debossed effect, with the lines appearing to sink below the surface.

This one, with a slightly different background, could be made to look like leather.

My final example is of some Chinese calligraphy. My apologies to any readers of Chinese – I have had to do a bit of cloning to get the image to fill the new canvas size, and I did this randomly to cover up the joins, and as a result the characters are not all in the right places! However, this is purely for decorative effect and will be used as a background for images and text, so it probably won’t be noticeable in use.

I have deliberately chosen fairly plain, neutral-coloured backgrounds for these examples, to show you how the principle works. However, you can experiment using different coloured backgrounds, and ones with an existing texture, and even using more than one texture overlay – the patterns combine to give some interesting results. For instance, if you have a striped texture, you can overlay it the second time at right angles to the first, and end up with a checked effect, but it goes a lot further than that. Actually the possibilities are endless.

I have created a couple of layouts using these backgrounds, which I may incorporate into a photo book of our holidays one day. This is the “title” page for Castle Acre Priory in Norfolk, and you can see how I have used the chequerboard flint wall as a texture overlay background, and put the images and text on top. I am grateful to Iris (http://trulytangoscraps.wordpress.com/category/friday-freebies/) not only for giving me the idea of trying these texture overlays, but also for some lovely free downloads that you can get if you subscribe to her blog, including the frames on this layout, which have a gorgeous mediaeval look which is in keeping with the ruined abbey.

Here’s another example of a layout I did, using the texture overlay process. This is made up of photos taken at Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire, and again, the gilt frame came from Iris – I wanted to reflect some of the opulence inside the house.

One day I shall get round to making all my holiday photos up into layouts.

I am very thrilled to have discovered this new technique, which I think will be very useful, and a good way to create an unusual background for a project, using elements from the same theme. You can also create backgrounds and textures unique to you.

Digital Scrapbooking Challenge

I’ve signed up to the Daisytrail site, a community for users of the Serif digital scrapbooking software. My friend Wendy recommended I have a look at all the gorgeous projects people have uploaded, as part of a challenge. Daisytrail recently provided a free digikit for Valentine’s Day, which is fairly limited, and the challenge was to make a layout using only stuff from this kit and nothing else (apart from a photo if you wanted to put one in), which they thought would be pretty challenging, but it’s amazing what people have done with it:

http://www.daisytrail.com/challenges.html?id=91

This evening I decided to download that kit and have a play around with it. When I uploaded it to my gallery on daisytrail, I discovered that the challenge doesn’t actually end until tomorrow, so I thought I might as well enter!

I don’t think I’ve ever done so much stuff for Valentine’s Day before in my life. I made a card for my hubby, and a hanging bon-bon basket, a card for my friend to give to her hubby, some ATCs for a swap on the Crafter’s Companion forum, and now a digital scrapbooking challenge entry! What fun it’s been.

I am getting seriously concerned that this is going to become a totally out of control addiction, however!! I’ve got “real” crafting that must be done – special birthday cards, Mothering Sunday, etc. etc. Once I’ve got the ironing done and my credit card statement checked through, I’m going up to my ARTHaven and getting stuck in – energy permitting! – but not tonight – it’s now nearly 2.30 a.m. and time for bed, methinks.

Personalised Choccie Boxes

When I opened the choccies my hubby gave me for Valentine’s, there was a leaflet inside saying that Thornton’s are now doing personalised boxes. You can upload your own photo and they will put it on the lid of the box, and you can choose a message to go on the side, and you can even choose which choccies they put in!

What a gift for digital scrapbookers! There is a limit to the size of the file you can upload, but they don’t tell you the measurements. I measured the little window on their web page and the proportions are 3:2, so I’ve designed a layout 9 in x 6 in to comply with those proportions, which I am going to have done for my hubby for our Silver Wedding Anniversary in May. (I just wish I didn’t have to wait that long before I get it done!)

I did this using Serif CraftArtist, which has a marvellous tool for extracting images from backgrounds. I spoke to the man from Serif on the phone the other day, and told him how much easier this tool is to use than the one on their PhotoPlus photo editing software, and he said that they are going to put it in the new version, which is good.

I also used the transparency tool to fade the main image, and the text, into the background.

One thing I really like about Serif software is that once you’ve got used to one program, the others are really easy to learn, because they tend to keep the interface the same, and many of the tools become familiar.

The picture shows Beatrice with my hubby. After lunch she always comes up asking for Dreamies, which are kitty snacks. These are the kitty equivalent of crack cocaine. Both our kitties adore them! Beatrice has a special relationship with my hubby and I have to prise her off him if I want to get anywhere near! In the small picture in the frame, you can see our two girlies together, with Phoebe at the top.

I can think of several other people I would like to get these personalised choccie boxes for. They do a range of prices depending on how big a box you choose – you can have more than one layer of choccies. I think it’s such a lovely idea!

Valentine Gifts

My wonderful hubby has given me a gorgeous present for Valentine’s Day. He really spoils me! I had a preview of it the other day just after he bought it, because he can never wait to give me presents!! As soon as I saw it, I gave it straight back to him and told him to keep it for Valentine’s Day!

Anyway, now that Valentine’s Day is here, he has given it to me and I am so thrilled with it! I think you’ll agree it’s a lovely present.

I love the box, even before opening! It is covered with the most beautiful rich iridescent blue paper, and the photo doesn’t really do it justice.

Opening the box…

It looks so pretty nesting on its blue velvet! Here’s a close-up showing the beautiful pearly face.

Here’s a detail of the bangle, which is decorated with a lattice/trellis pattern in gold, with black enamel between – very pretty! I love this design.

Here’s one final view of my beautiful present.

Doesn’t he spoil me!

He really liked the card I made for him:

http://shoshiplatypus.blogspot.com/2011/01/valentine-card.html

and the little bon-bon basket, which I hung on his desk lamp last night before I went up to bed:

http://shoshiplatypus.blogspot.com/2011/02/valentine-bon-bon-basket.html

I was just about to sign off this post, when my hubby came in bringing this!

We aren’t going out or doing anything special today, but we are going to see the film “The King’s Speech” on Thursday, which we are very much looking forward to.

Wallaby Catch-All

The delightfully-named Wallaby Catch-All is a sort of sling/pouch arrangement to be attached underneath a wheelchair to carry things in. The US suppliers, Advantage Bag:

http://www.advantagebag.com/wheelchair_underseat_catchalls.htm

describe it as follows:

“CATCH ALLS

“For use with Rigid and Folding Wheelchairs
Securely attaches with convenient Velcro hook and loop to bottom horizontal and rear vertical frame tubing.
Forms a net shelf under the Wheelchair seat.

“A great way to utilize wasted space.
When filled assists in keeping chair from tipping back.
Available in Black and four sizes.”

I bought one of these for my first wheelchair, and it was absolutely ideal. There is nothing equivalent available in the UK.

When I got my new wheelchair recently, I decided to transfer it over, but it was designed for a wheelchair with a lower frame as well as an upper one, and the new Quickie Helium has an extremely lightweight, minimalist frame which dispenses with the need for the lower frame; when I attached the Catch-All to this, it was too high, and was difficult to put things in, and also did not hold enough. I revisited the Advantage Bag site and was pleased to see that they had introduced further Catch-Alls into their range, but they were all still designed for wheelchairs with the double frame, which I found surprising in view of the number of chairs coming online these days with only the upper frame like mine.

I did not want to buy any other sort of bag because they don’t hold enough, so I decided to adapt the Catch-All that I had. I obtained some black hemp twine from Ebay and proceeded to crochet some sides for it. After I had done this, it was a simple matter to tie the Catch-All onto the frame of the wheelchair with black tape.

This has proved even more successful than I’d hoped. It looks good, and anything I put in it stays there. On my previous wheelchair, the sides were open, and on one occasion I lost something out of the side, but this can no longer happen.

I am intending to contact Advantage Bag and let them know what I have done, and recommend that they introduce a design along the same lines, which can be used with the new design of wheelchair frame, and which is secure at the sides.

Another Valentine Card

We had lunch out with our friends David and Gisele today, and afterwards we came back to our house, and I showed her my ARTHaven and the card I’d made for my hubby for Valentine’s Day. She told me she had had a horrendous work week and hadn’t even had time to think about Valentine’s, let alone get a card or present, and she asked me if I could “knock something up.” This isn’t the normal way I work so it was a bit of a challenge, but I rose to it, and we did it together. She said more or less what she wanted, and I got going!

First of all I rubber stamped the butterfly background using two sizes of stamps and Tattered Rose Distress Ink, sometimes printing off the excess ink onto a piece of scrap paper first, to give a subtle, misty look, and then inked the edges with Spun Sugar Distress Ink. I then made a heart template and drew round it onto red card, reduced the size and drew round it again, and handed it over to Gisele to cut out. She loved my Tim Holtz scissors and I told her they were the best scissors I’d ever owned! I stamped these two hearts with a darker red ink pad, using the same butterfly stamp. I heat embossed the same butterfly shape with gold embossing powder, and stuck the larger heart down with double-sided tape. Gisele was fascinated to see the gold emerge as I heated the embossing powder – I remember how thrilled I was the very first time I saw it, and actually it still gives me a thrill! It looks like magic as the dull, grainy powder is transformed into pure gold before your eyes! The smaller heart was stuck down with dimensionals.

Gisele then chose some lace out of my lace bits box and I stuck this down with double sided tape before adding the ribbon and the bow. Again, she enjoyed seeing the bow being made on the bowshaper I bought at the show. She chose the little embellishment to go on the bow, which was one of the jewelled flower stamens I’d bought in the cake decorating shop. I then matted the card onto red card – A4 folded to A5 size, and the final touch was the little gold butterfly adhered with my hot glue gun.

While I was stamping and inking, she was busy making a ribbon rose – I had bought some gorgeous 2-tone green and pink wide, wired ribbon at the show, and showed her how to pull up the wire on one edge to form a ruche, and wrap the end of the wire round the base and cover the base and wire with florist’s tape to form the stem. She said she would like to put it on the envelope, so I found a plain white envelope and proceeded to decorate it to co-ordinate with the card.

Again, I stamped butterflies at random with Tattered Rose Distress Ink, and inked the edges with Spun Sugar Distress Ink. She chose some silk leaves from my stash, as she felt those went better with the fabric rose than paper ones, and I stuck it down with my hot glue gun. The final touch was another butterfly embellishment, this time in pink, again stuck down with my hot glue gun. Just room for her to write his name on the envelope!

We talked about butterflies and how we love them, and agreed that they are a symbol of freedom and beauty, and also transformation and growth, all important aspects of any marriage. On the card, she wanted to butterfly embellishment to look as if it had just flown up from the smaller heart, to symbolise that a real expression of your love for someone is that you don’t hold them down and control them, but allow them to be free – when they choose to stay with you, that love is really worth something!

At lunch today, I had no idea I would be in my ARTHaven today, or that I would make another Valentine card this year! We had such fun together in my ARTHaven, sharing ideas and having a good laugh too, and together we created this lovely card for her hubby. We both agreed what fun it was, working with someone else, and we are going to try and do it again soon. She saw my florist’s ribbon kit that I got at the show, and the flower which the man on the stand had made, and really admired it, so I said we could make some of those together – I want to make a tiny bouquet to go in a window card for my mum for Mothering Sunday.

ATCs for the Crafter’s Companion Forum Swap

My friend Wendy has persuaded me to join my first ever swap! This is the February ATC (Artist Trading Card) swap, and I’m really excited about it. I’ve always thought I hadn’t really got time to do swaps, because when I’ve got the energy to do anything creative, it’s to complete projects I have to do for people’s birthdays etc. etc., but I thought, ATCs are small so don’t take too long, and it would be fun to have a go!

The theme for this month’s swap is “Love/Valentine” (of course!), so I decided to do something with hearts and a red colour scheme. When I was at the craft show I bought some scrim from the mixed media stand and have been keen to try it. It’s a natural, unbleached colour, so I cut some small rectangles (really difficult to handle, so I damped it a bit, which made it a lot easier) and then I swiped my Fired Brick Distress Ink pad across my craft mat, spritzed it with water and mussed the pieces around in it till they were a nice shade of red. Afterwards I dried them using my heat gun.

I’ve got some lovely hand-made paper with leaves in it, and I tore some little rectangles from this, and hand-wrote some words on them. The “Love” ones I stuck with photo-mount spray adhesive to the dyed scrim pieces.

I created the background paper with Serif Craft Artist Platinum, the new digital scrapbooking software that I recently obtained – and still have to learn how to use. What I wanted was a hand-made paper look, with a small repeating pattern on it, which in this case is made up of two different heart embellishments.

The top part of this background paper was torn, and overlaid onto a piece of black and pink Core-dinations card which I scored in close parallel lines on my Scor-Pal board, and then sanded, exposing the pink core on the raised parts. This Core-dinations card forms the basis for the ATC.

I cut two hearts for each ATC, one in bright red and the other in darker red, and stamped the bright red one with a darker red ink. The hearts were then hand-embossed from behind, and adhered to the ATC with Pinflair glue to prevent them being squashed. The text pieces were then added, using photo-mount spray adhesive.

I printed the clock face images onto card, and cut them out by hand, and then picked out the Roman numerals with Perfect Pearls, using a very fine watercolour brush.

Finally, I punched out some small hearts from gold paper and stuck these randomly onto the card. I had designed some ATC labels on the computer, using a hand-written script which I have converted into a font, and I glued these onto the backs of the ATCs, completing the details (title, date, etc.).

They have now been sent off, and I look forward to seeing what lovely ATCs come back to me at the end of the month!

Valentine Bon-Bon Basket

I am grateful to Carol on the Extreme Cards and Papercrafting blog:

http://extremecards.blogspot.com/2011/02/froebel-weaving-valentine-candy-basket.html

for sharing the design for this gorgeous little hanging basket of sweets. I know I shouldn’t be encouraging the hubby to eat such things – I’m actually trying to encourage him to lose weight, but I couldn’t resist this, and everyone deserves spoiling sometimes.

Here are another couple of shots to show the sides in more detail.

I cut the shape and the strips from the .svg file I downloaded. The basket shape had slits cut in it, through which you weave the strips of coloured card. I also made an extra .svg file the same shape as the basket but without the slits, to be cut from red card to line the basket so that the backs of the woven pieces don’t show.

I’m going to hang it on his desk lamp so he sees it when he gets up. What’s the betting all those little sweets will be gone by lunch time?

Digital Scrapbooking–My First Layout!

At last I’ve managed to get going on my new Serif Craft Artist Platinum software for digital scrapbooking. My friend Wendy is absolutely brilliant at this, and has encouraged me no end, and been very helpful, and when this new software was launched at the end of January I decided to get it, and it’s certainly very powerful.

Last night I used one of their existing backgrounds and added a repeating pattern of tiny hearts, to created a background paper to print out for the ATCs I’m making (more on that when they are finished).

This evening, after coming down from my ARTHaven, I thought I’d have a go at working through some of the video tutorials for the software, and did the first one on Basic Skills, in about 6 parts, and made my first layout! It’s a picture of my parents a few years ago, at our local Pick Your Own fruit picking place.

I love the way you can make part of a picture project outside the frame! It’s really cool. Also, the shadow tool is awesome. All you do is select your object or group of objects, click on the shadow tool, and drag and drop the selected object in the direction you want the shadow, and as far from the object as you want it, and then drop, and lo and behold, a perfect shadow! Easy peasy.

The frames are really smart, too – you just drag a photo into the frame and it automatically crops the photo to fit. If you don’t like how it’s placed or how big it is, you can zoom and pan until it’s just right.

The scissors tool will cut out objects (like the “paper” with the text on it – this was using a square shaped cut) and you can make it as big or small as you like, and there’s an edge tool to make loads of different fancy edges, like a frayed edge to a piece of fabric, and the brushes are amazing too – you get all the usual things like charcoal lines etc. but also there’s stitching and other effects – all with full photo realism.

There is just so much to explore and to learn with this software, which is very powerful. It’s going to take me ages to work through all the tutorials and get the knowledge under my belt so that it becomes second nature.

It’s a lovely thing to be able to do when I feel the creative buzz but don’t have the energy to sit at my table in my ARTHaven and do “real” stuff.

Embossing and Inking

When I was at the craft show I saw some excellent demonstrations, and was keen to try the techniques out for myself before I forgot what had been done. The first one involved using heat embossing as a resist, and creating a background from blended distress inks. I have done a bit of blending distress inks for backgrounds before, but usually by smearing the pad onto my craft sheet, spritzing it with water and rubbing the card onto it, but this was done with blending pads straight from the ink pad onto the card, which allowed a lot more control, and also produced more intense colours. At the show I filled the gaps in my collection of Tim Holtz distress inks, so I now have a good range of colours, some of which are very similar, so they can be blended very well from dark to light.

I have also used heat embossed images as a resist, but didn’t take it further as this demonstrator did, and was very keen to experiment with it. The other demonstrator used some different techniques, and I will post about that when I’ve had the chance to experiment.

This has also got me excited about stamping again! I bought quite a lot of stamps last year when I first got started in earnest, and to be honest I haven’t used them much at all, because I felt that they were a bit limiting, and I tended to do my own thing more, but seeing the demonstrators using stamps, it has made me see that there’s far more to them than just plonking an image onto a card and colouring it. Using just part of a stamp, or stamping off the edge of the card, and making multiple impressions on the card from one application of ink on the pad – all these things add an extra dimension to one’s stamping, and I am getting my stamps out again! I am really pleased to be doing this.

So… what have I done? I started by rummaging in my card scraps box and selecting a number of small rectangles in various colours. I then chose some stamps, and stamped these pieces of card using Versamark, and applied white embossing powder. After melting with my heat gun, I proceeded to ink the whole surface of the card, starting with lighter colours and gradually working from the edges with darker colours, and blending them together. It reminded me of magic painting when I was a child – you had what looked like a blank sheet of paper, and as you painted with water over the top, the colours would emerge, and you would gradually see your picture appear. As I inked over the white embossed image, the shape would emerge.

To do the blending, I made some new felt pad blenders from squares of Cut ’n Dry Foam that I bought at the show, glued with double sided tape onto some wood blocks that I’d kept after unmounting a lot of my original rubber stamps (they take up a lot less room unmounted) – I didn’t know what I was going to do with the blocks that were left, but I’m glad I didn’t throw them away! These home-made blocks are quite a lot more substantial than the Tim Holtz felt pads held onto the applicator with Velcro, and you can put quite a lot of pressure on them. I’ve made a selection, one for reds, one for browns, one for blues, etc. and if I’m using a lighter shade after I’ve used a dark one, I just rub the pad on some scrap paper till it’s more or less clean.

After inking the backgrounds, on some of the cards, I inked the same stamp with Black Soot Distress Ink (and on a couple of them, Walnut Stain Distress Ink) and stamped the card again, slightly off-set, to create a shadow effect. The demonstrator showed us how to remove the ink off the embossed part with a piece of kitchen paper, starting from the edge and working inwards, so as not to smudge ink onto the card. The embossed part still looked dirty, so she took a baby wipe and moistened the centre part of the stamped image, and then using kitchen paper again, she wiped gently outwards this time, to pick up the remaining ink, revealing the clean white of the embossing. It’s amazing the three-dimensional effect this shadow stamping gives.

On some of my card samples, I stamped a sentiment, and on a couple, I stamped and embossed the sentiment in the same way as the images.

When I make cards out of these samples, I will probably add ribbons and other embellishments; they will be mounted on larger pieces of card to co-ordinate with my designs.

As well as putting into practice some techniques while they were fresh in my mind, and having a great deal of fun while doing it, this is also enabling me to build up a bit of a card stash of basic cards which will be useful when I need a card quickly. I have a few embossed ones I did some months ago as well, and want to make some ATCs to slot into those, and I also want to make some more cards similar to those in the stationery box I made before Christmas, with interchangeable tags with sentiments for different occasions. I am fed up with being confronted with card deadlines that I cannot possibly meet!

Here’s a picture of my efforts.

The geometric ones along the top were also painted with perfect pearls to give some added shimmer. The photo doesn’t really do them justice.

When I’ve made them up into cards, I’ll post some more pictures. This was a whole lot of fun to do!!