In addition to graduations and Father's Day, June is the traditional month for weddings. Today would have been my parent's 65th wedding anniversary. Unfortunately, we lost my mother 16 years ago - just short of their 49th anniversary. When I look at the photos of my parents on their wedding day, they seem so young (they were 23).
You may remember reading about the veil headpiece that my Mom wore for the wedding. It survived packed away in a box all these years (the actual veil disintegrated over time). If you click the photo above, you can see the beginning of the story of how I reused some flowers from the headpiece to make the ring pillow for our older son's wedding last September.
This is the finished ring pillow - there are six flowers from the headpiece attached to the vintage linens that I used for the pillow. You can click this photo to see the details about making the pillow.
When my parents were married, there were not the thousands of photographs taken that you would find for a modern wedding (and obviously no video or slideshows!). I only have seen a few photos from their wedding day. My Dad's two brothers stood up for him and my Mom had a close friend and her younger sister Cora as attendants. I always thought it was interesting that the attendants wore white and carried red roses.
I made these simple digital pages by scanning in the one photo that I have in a frame. When you don't have many photos, you can always crop to highlight certain parts of the photo and use the closer cropped views for your pages as well. I used the Creative Memories StoryBook Creator 4.0 program to make these pages. The papers, ribbon and embellishments are from the Enchanted Digital Power Palette and the "wedding party" phrase is from the Divine Wedding Digital Kit. (These are both available in universal format if you use another digital scrapbooking program - Enchanted UF and Divine Wedding UF).
My sister and my niece both wore my Mom's wedding gown when they were married - I wonder if someday it will be worn by a fourth generation?
The possibilities of die cutting are fascinating to me. I have been working on lots of new projects and experimenting to see how intricate I can make my designs. I wanted to share a few sneak peeks at some original images I have been able to cut with my Silhouette Cameo.
I think of these cuts as "cobweb lace" since some many of the lines are about 1/16 of an inch and some are even thinner. I am using the tip of a quilling tool to hold the cuts for the photos if that helps you understand the scale.
I am amazed that these cut so well. I was able to just lift the finished designs from the mat with only a few tiny pieces that needed to be pushed out.
Several people have asked for more information about the Creative Memories software that is on sale this month. Memory Manager 3.0 is the photo editing and organization software and StoryBook Creator 4.0 is the digital scrapbooking (and so much more) program. (Both programs are 35% off until the end of April (so Memory Manager is $25.97 and StoryBook Creator is $42.22 - if you already have an earlier version of the program, the upgrades are also on sale).
Photo editing makes such a difference - you can often turn a "so-so" photo into something really special. I used Memory Manager to edit this photo.
After you edit the photo, you can get creative with the many design and layout tools in the StoryBook Creator program. I used an oil painting effect on this photo.
You can start from a blank page or work with professionally designed templates to create your layouts. The StoryBook program comes with over $75 worth of free digital content and you can also use digital content obtained from other sources in the program.
If you'd like to see the full original post about these photos and some more digital pages just click HERE.
In honor of National Scrapbook Day, there will be a 35% off sale on all digital content from Creative Memories from April 27th (Friday) to May 5th. There will be lots of other items on sale and I'll have the details for you in another post.
I'd be happy to help you with specific questions - both of these programs are easy to use and have lots of advanced features for a very reasonable price (particularly when they are on sale!).
Today is the last day to leave a comment to have a chance to win a card kit from the class I taught last week. Click HERE to go to the post about the class and leave your comment with a helpful tip for your fellow crafters! I'll draw and post the names tomorrow.
Easter is just a couple of weeks away. After all the mild weather we've been having, the temperatures have plummeted and we may have a freeze overnight. We had snow on Halloween and maybe we could have it on Easter too!
One of the sponsors at the Blissdom conference last month was Hershey's. They had a fun booth where you could design a custom Easter basket and take a photo with the Easter Bunny (sorry - I didn't get one!). My basket filled with some delicious chocolate treats should arrive soon. When we made our basket choices, we were asked to join the Hershey's "Bunny Trail" and post some Easter tips, memories or traditions.
You can follow the Bunny Trail by clicking the image above to go to the Hershey's site. You'll find coloring pages, craft projects, egg hunt ideas, egg decorating stencils and holders and even some digital scrapbook papers.
When I think back to Easter in my childhood, there are a few things that stand out. I have two older sisters and we always had special Easter outfits - including hats. That's me in the photo with a corsage almost as big as my head. These dresses often were matching sister dresses in sets of two or three. When my brother came along, he didn't have to dress to match! Some years when the weather was still chilly we had fluffy white muffs to keep our hands warm (yes, I really am that old!).
Apparently, when we posed for these photos I was not about to let go of my Easter basket! My love of chocolate started early and continues to this day. When I was little my favorite was the plain Hershey milk chocolate bar, now I prefer the dark chocolate. Growing up in Pennsylvania, I had several school field trips to Hershey, PA. We would take a tour of the factory and then go to the amusement park (I guess the factory tour satisfied the "educational" component of the field trip!).
I really don't remember my Dad wearing bow ties but he had one on for this Easter photo. It's always fun to look at old photos and see the styles and how we looked when were were young. It looks like that basket was getting a bit heavy - I can hardly hold it up. We always had a chocolate bunny and there was a great debate over the proper way to eat it. It seems cruel to take off the ears first, but I think that is the most popular way to start!
I scanned these old photos and made a digital scrapbook page with my Creative Memories StoryBook Creator 4.0 software using the Reminisce Spring Digital Additions. It was interesting to see that the next photos in the book were from my birthday in July. We didn't take a lot of photos, so the ones that are left are very special to me.
Our family has a great tradition of egg hunts. When our boys were young, we lived near my sister in New Jersey and she would hard boil five or six dozen (!) eggs. They were dyed in lots of pastel colors and my brother-in-law would hide them in the yard.
He would keep track with an elaborate hand drawn map to make sure that
all of the eggs would be found. The hunt was quite challenging (think yellow eggs high up in a forsythia bush) and everyone would get involved in helping the kids find the eggs.
My Dad always would get a big kick out of both the hiding and the search. For years we have kept up a joke of hiding eggs (the plastic kind with Hershey's nuggets and jelly beans inside) at his apartment whenever we visit. Last time I was there he gave me a bag with what he thought were the "last of the eggs." Little does he know that they'll be returning, refilled and hidden in unexpected spots, when we go to visit Easter weekend.
In 2010, I made the layout above for some egg hunt photos. I had forgotten about it but now I am motivated to find some photos from the New Jersey egg hunts and fill in the photos spots! I even made an egg card with some of the offcut pieces. You can find details about the card and the layout and how I designed it HERE.
Thanks to Hershey's for motivating me to make this heritage page and for the Easter basket that will arrive soon. Be sure to check out the Bunny Trail - there are lots of fun things for you there.
What are some of your favorite Easter Memories? I'd love to hear about your family traditions.
Happy Monday - I hope you had a great weekend. There are only 20 days left before Christmas - oh my! There are a million things to be done but I'll just try to do them one by one. My first priority is to get some things in the mail so they have plenty of time to arrive. I also have to make a Costco run to get batteries for the window candles and lots of other holiday extras. Our house looks naked with no lights in the windows - I think it is required to have them if you live in New England!
Sometimes, when I have too much to do, I get sidetracked and spend time doing a less essential activity - I think it is a stubborn streak coming out. Sunday I had a list of things to do that was a mile long but I really wanted to try out some new digital content. So the list is still quite long - the lure of the laptop was too great after a week with no computer while we were traveling!
I have a weakness for digital papers and embellishments - particularly the holiday themed items. I hadn't noticed the digital card kits from Creative Memories until a week or so ago and I just bought a few of them to try. The White Christmas Digital Card Kit had some great artwork but the colors were not right for what I had in mind. If I was buying physical paper, I would have just skipped this set but with digital, you can change many items to look very different from the original art.
I started with the holly flourish at the bottom of this screen shot. I wanted more traditional colors, so I isolated each set of elements by color and changed them to red, green and gold. Then I flipped and grouped and mirrored the groups to make a larger frame.
I copied the frame to a new page and adjusted the size to make it an eleven inch square.
I added the "happy holidays" from the Winter Delight Digital Embellishments (an older set I have had for a while) and sized it to make the curls intersect with the flourishes in the holly clusters.
I added a shadow to all of the elements - it is difficult to see the shadow on the dark background but you can tell that there is a more dimensional effect.
Here is the same image with a beige background - without a shadow above...
...and with the shadow added. These are just screen shots of the pages so they might not show clearly how sharp the digital images are.
The plain background can be filled with a digital paper or you can add a surface from the options that are built in to the program - here I used the lace texture to create a different look.
I also purchased the Holiday Digital Card Kit. These kits have some papers and embellishments and also templates for some of the fine stationery cards that you can have printed by the CM Digital Center. You can also print these at home if you have a suitable printer.
I used some of the papers and elements to create a 12 x 12 page that I could have printed to use in my display frame for the holidays. The colors are a bit "country" and subdued so I decided to try to brighten the page a bit.
I adjusted the levels in the Brightness and Light section of the Color panel to make a slightly brighter and more cheerful version of the page. There are some great embellishments in this set with the glittered ornaments, felt tree and sparkly snowflake.
One of my favorite features of the CM Storybook Creator 4.0program is that it allows you to use all sorts of digital content - you are not limited to just the CM artwork (though I do end up buying quite a few of the sets that are offered). Here I used a damask overlay that I colorwashed with green. I also like to create my own papers and elements with the program.
Here is one more version with the same damask (rotated and colorwashed to a brown tone) and the images glittered with the block surface effect. If you have questions about the software please post a comment and I'll try to answer them in the next day or two. I am also still catching up on all of the email from while I was away, I should be able to finish those messages tomorrow as well.
I want to thank everyone who has used my link to join Blitsy, the new bargain site for all sorts of crafting products. If you haven't checked it out yet here is the link
If you use my link to sign up, I can earn credits. After you sign up, you should get your own referral code (you'll find it on the "invites" page) and then you can let your friends and family know about the site so you can earn credits too.
I am expecting my first Blitsy order to arrive today. Be sure to check
the site every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to see what goodies are
added. There has been a lot of great stuff so far (Tim Holtz, Ranger, Spellbinders, Zutter, etc.). I was able to get some Christmas gifts and a few things that will end up in my blogoversary celebration packages next year.
Here is one more photo from our trip. This is a courtyard in one of the palaces at the Alhambra. I am planning to make a file to cut a page background like the interlinking chains - isn't that pretty? I should be able to do it for both the Cricut and the Silhouette - I just need to find the time to fit it in with all of the holiday preparations.
Today is the day we go back to standard time. I am very fond of the "fall back" day and I sometimes play a game and turn the clock later in the day so I get the feeling that I am actually gaining an hour! The part I don't like is sunset at 4:30 in the afternoon (and it will only get worse until January).
My trip to Maine was great. I enjoyed talking to the group and meeting some new people. We had a lovely turkey dinner so it was like an early Thanksgiving celebration. I was exhausted by the time we got back and needed to rest and take the night off (even though I really wanted to work with my some of my new finds).
I wanted to share this photo of some roses that are still blooming. We saw them in a garden in town when we were walking to the Antiques Fair. The faded blooms just appealed to me - the last roses of summer in November! The photo above is my original image directly from the camera - no cropping or editing.
After some photo editing magic (done with Creative Memories Memory Manager 3.0) I had this image. I was thinking of adding a quote or short poem in the lower left corner and using this for a card. To do that, I added the edited photo to a new project in Creative Memories StoryBook Creator 4.0
I started to play around with the images and used one of the filters to create a rose "tile" (you can see the 3D edges that were added.
It is always interesting the see the subsidiary patterns that form when you arrange symmetrical groupings of the same image.
To create this image, I rotated some of the roses in the lower left corner.
I grouped the four tiles and then made another page with four of the groupings. The rotation shows the original shadow and creates the uneven effect with the borders.
This final image is made up of sixteen rose images in groups of four that are mirrored and flipped to create the symmetrical pattern.
Even though I started with just a simple photo, I was able to create something unique and pretty in a short amount of time. I will print out some of these patterns I have been making so I can use them for projects. Once again, I wish that I could use my Imagine to print 12 x 12 copies of the images that I create in addition to the images that are on the cartridges. Maybe someday...
In the meanwhile, does anyone have a suggestion for a good but not too expensive wide format printer? I think that may be on my wish list for Christmas...
