Life is good. I’m still working on a bunch of projects, a lot of PS (upgrade to CS6 is coming right up in a few days–wahoo!) and some HTML. I’m looking into paths I could choose for a career change, since my teaching career is pretty much kaput until I make up a whoooooole lotta Act 48 credits. Mine from NJ didn’t count for anything toward my PA certificate, even though I was teaching in NJ the whole time and NOT in PA. It’s ok because it’s time for a change anyway. I loved teaching and some day when I have a bigger/more suitable place, I’ll teach instrument lessons, but I’m not even in any hurry for that.

I am pretty sure I want to stay involved in computers and design. I have been researching a media design program from an online university that looks pretty interesting. It’s a Master of Fine Arts in Media Design from Full Sail University, if anyone is interested. I’m still not sure I’m going to do it, but it’s something I’m toying around with. Coupled with the html 5 video class I’ve been taking, and my work in PhotoShop, I might be leaning toward web design. At any rate, the information in that program at the very least would benefit job-hunting in the field. I will figure it all out in time. For now, I’ve got one more month of school for the boys before my annual trek up to my hometown to work construction/remodeling with my dad and brother. After that I will be going back to work, whether that is in a new career, or a filler position until which time I have my path in order. It is bittersweet for me. This year has been so wonderful. I’ve been able to be home when my boys are sick, without being made to feel like I’ve let everybody at school down. I’ve been able to establish a routine at home and sit down to eat real meals with the family every night, instead of always being on the fly. I’m not driving hundreds of miles every week, which is wonderful. It only took me 9 of 10 school months to feel like a stay-at-home-mom and now it’s over. Ahh, well. Such is life, right?

Anyhooo, I just wanted to post a general synopsis of what’s up, since I’ve been MIA for a few weeks. Hope everybody’s having a great May!

SO…I’ve been working hard with the trial of PS CS6 for the last week, and I’ve finally come up with my very own digital scrapbooking page kit! I could probably do with another element or so, but for some of my very first designs, this one is complete, and it looks just fine, if I do say so myself! I hope to toss it up on my website one of these days, but I’m still working on that. The website isn’t going very well, but the kit is cool! It’s called Boys and Toys and it looks like this:

I hope you like it–I’m super excited to have a complete kit under my belt. I hope to do a few special occasion kits in the coming weeks! Thanks for reading, friends, your support is noticed and appreciated!

Heather

PS CS6-Beta

Wow, I didn’t know how much fun PS could be until I finally opened up my CS6 Beta version! I’ve been using PSE9 a relatively short time (I really didn’t open it up until February of this year) and I’ve learned tons of things from the ladies over at DSP. I like PSE9, but I know that I’ll eventually need to upgrade to a CS product if I want to do more design work. So yesterday, after speaking to a rep from Adobe about what package I will buy, I began my free 60-day trial to CS6. It was amazing, and overwhelming!

Going from no background in PhotoShop whatsoever to PSE9 for a couple of months to the big, bad, brand-new CS6 is quite a big step. I was surprised to see how many shortcuts are different in the program. I assumed that since they were both made by the same company, that PSE would be a lite version of PS, with many missing components, but basically the same interface. I guess in the grand scheme of things, maybe this is true, but from my perspective and with my limited experience, this is not exactly the case.

Let me say that as confusing as it is, there are tutorials for just about everything online. I wanted to make a seamless pattern and in 3 seconds, there were 12 seamless pattern tutorials in front of me, plus dozens more pages of search results. If you find a really good tutorial, it goes pretty quickly, and voila! You have your very own seamless pattern. Other times, you’ll pick out a tut where the narrator assumes you know what little steps he’s skipped (because he is so familiar with the program) and it can really throw you for a loop. I found both, but overall, I learned how to create a seamless pattern and have used it several times already to make digital scrapbook background papers–woo hoo!

I’m having a few issues converting the things I used to do in PSE to CS6, and right now, I can’t tell if it’s user error (most likely) or a legitimate bug in the program. A little more playing around and I’ll figure that out, I’m sure. The best thing to do, like all the designers have told me, is to just play around with it and find all the little nuances and ways to make your papers really work! I’m fortunate enough to be in a community with excellent digital designers who have been around the block a few times and who are willing to answer my one million questions–that really helps.

At any rate, if you’re interested in checking out PS CS6 (it’s probably coming out in May sometime) you can go download it from Adobe here. It’s worth a look and while you’re at it, come by www.digitalscrapbookplace.com and join me in an outstanding community of digital scrappers where you can learn how to work the software!

Hopefully I’ll get some designs up and running here and be able to post something on my website for download soon!

Cheers!

Seeing the big picture

I’m learning so many wonderful things during this time in which I don’t have to go to work, mostly related to digital scrapbooking, but a few other random things as well. I haven’t done as much with my website as I had wanted, and frankly, I’m kind of stuck, my vision having ended in frustration at trying to do it all myself. I have some great books on Dreamweaver and blogging that I’ve paged through, looking for things I need to know, but I am having trouble with what should come first–the big picture. I’ve always had trouble with that. I can’t walk into a room and imagine it a completely different color with different furnishings and decor. I have the most trouble with this and I don’t know why, and I wish I could just do it the way I feel others can. I wish I could see a scrapbook page in my head or a website in my head, completely finished (even if changes come about in the process of creating it). I feel like if I could make myself see the finished product, I could do so much more amazing things, and really speed my projects up a lot.

Come to think of it, it goes way beyond decorating and crafting. It is a reflection on my entire life. I can’t figure out where I’m going in life because my whole world has changed directions completely and I feel as though I’m kind of left here, trying to decide what I want to be when I grow up. I’m waaaay out of school, so anything I might learn to do from here on out is up to me entirely. Do I want to spend time and money getting myself back into teaching just to have a reliable income? Do I want to go try something completely new and start from square one and work my way up? I don’t know, and I can’t see past the end of my nose on this one. I have NO IDEA what I want and I can’t even find the direction to the big picture here!

I think of this as a shortcoming, and something I’d like to improve upon. I feel like it’s holding me back from finding my niche in the world. I can do a lot of things fairly decently, but nothing seems to stand out as the one thing I’m good at. I think if I can gain this clarity, I’ll find that one thing and then I’ll be able to meet my potential and work hard to exceed it. Maybe I’m missing the point entirely and wasting precious moments of my life looking for something that is impossible to find. I just don’t know.

Anyway, I am going to continue to work on my digital and scrapbook design, dabbling with my website and enjoying my time to be home with my little guys and maybe one day I’ll come across the magic inspiration that helps me see the big picture clearly. Maybe I’ll find the one thing that I can provide to the world and then I’ll make it my job to provide it. I hope it comes soon, though, because I’m almost out of time to figure it out.

Looking for Love

Hi to my humongous WordPress audience!  I just posted a scrapbook layout to Teresa Loman’s (of digitalscrapbookplace.com) facebook page.  The deal is, if I can get the most people to go to her page and “Like” my layout, I’ll get a free kit of digital scrapping stuff, so I’m reaching out to my loyal fans and asking you to go and “Like” my page, please!  Here is a link to the layout:I hope you genuinely like it!  It’s done using Teresa’s Mary Alice Value Collection. Happy “liking”!

Looking for Love

Hi to my humongous WordPress audience!  I just posted a scrapbook layout to Teresa Loman’s (of digitalscrapbookplace.com) facebook page.  The deal is, if I can get the most people to go to her page and “Like” my layout, I’ll get a free kit of digital scrapping stuff, so I’m reaching out to my loyal fans and asking you to go and “Like” my page, please!  Here is a link to the layout:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=3517856625418&set=o.118670361492991&type=1&theater

I hope you genuinely like it!  It’s done using Teresa’s Mary Alice Value Collection.  :)  Happy “Liking”!

I think I’m hooked

I do so love my paper scrapping, but digital is steadily reeling me in. I can see that paper may start to become more of a social scrapping event than a productivity one. Messing around with overlays and blending and a monochromatic color scheme today, I came up with this beauty. Well, my friends donated the beauty who is the subject, I just added the backdrop. Soon enough, I’ll get back to blogging more than just the pages I did today, but I’m having too much fun playing around with PSE right now!

Credits: Pleasantly Plum Page Kit by Lora Speiser of digitalscrapbookplace.com

…or you can go completely digital and see how you like it.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in the past month learning how to scrap digitally. I found a lovely group of digital scrappers at digitalscrapbookplace.com and it feels like a great fit for me and my scrapping goals at the present. In this first month, I’ve taken part in a contest they hold every 6 months or so called NKOTB and in it, you scrap one layout per round for three rounds, each lasting a week. At the end of the week, after having read and taken advice from their seasoned digital scrappers, you select your best version of your page and submit it as your final for each round. Now that the three rounds are done, they are having a judging (optional for the contestants) and I’ve chosen a layout to submit for judging.

It’s been such a great learning experience that even if there were no judging, it would be more than worth the time and effort put into this contest. I went in knowing next to nothing in PSE (Photoshop Elements, my scrapping software of choice) and came out knowing a lot more than next to nothing–still not nearly all there is to know, but these things take time. I feel like I almost have the hang of working with layers, or at least I remember now that when it isn’t doing what I want it to do, I should check if I’m on the right layer first before crying. More importantly, besides the invaluable amount of knowledge I’ve gained already, I’ve met another community of great people who do exactly what it is I want to do. They really know their stuff, some are designers and some are just excellent scrappers, but they all have so many tricks of the trade to offer new people. I can’t say enough how glad I am to have come across their site.

So, the contest. I made the following three layouts, using products they gave us to use from their store/designers. The first was the one that I spent the most time tweaking (after all, I didn’t even know how to pull the photos onto the project from the bar at the bottom–total noob here) and I made approximately 40 versions of this layout before settling on this one:

This page was created using the Abstruse Aquamarine Page Kit by Teresa Loman, and GE Twill Script font, as well as Word Art by Marcee Duggar, also of DSP! I learned a LOT creating this page, through constructive criticism by the members of the group.

The second page I made was much easier. Somehow, I just had all the right things to make this work, and I hardly had to revise it at all, maybe twice. This page was made with Flourishing Romance Page Kit by Meryl Bartho, and an overlay template, Sweetest Memories by Kim Liddiard. I chose this layout to be the one in the judging, although the choice was very difficult, because I love all three of these layouts.

And the final round was made using My Heart Belongs Page Kit by Lauren Bavin and a few elements from Meryl Bartho’s Flourishing Romance (from the previous round) Page Kit. I also scraplifted the general shape of a layout by another of the members of DSP for this round of the contest. I loved working with these colors, and spent a few hours creating a torn edge that I never did wind up using on this page, but don’t worry, I saved it for later! Here is Apple Picking:

All in all, I have enjoyed greatly digital scrapping, and I’m glad to see that PSE hasn’t been as tough as I thought it was going to be to learn. I did lose my paper mojo for a week or so, but I am happy to say that I’ll never give up my tactile tradition either. I may need to focus on the digital, since I want to use it to generate income someday soon, but my paper is still sitting here, staring me in the face. I hope you enjoy these layouts, and ones to come as well. I know I enjoyed creating them!

For my sister Kelly, who is in a magically horrible mood tonight:

Costume Jewelry has a place on your page

I know this page is a little out of season, I’ll be back to February momentarily.  Looking through my finished layout photos today, I came across this one, and somehow, even though the page itself seems “meh” to me, that OWL just strikes me every time I see him.  I was out yard-saling for the first time back in September and at this one place that had really pricey clothing for sale, I spotted this piece of costume jewelry for 25 cents.  I was immediately smitten.  I had never thought of myself as an owl fan or anything, but something about this piece caught my eye, and I scooped him up.  My future MIL looked at me like I was crazy because I don’t wear jewelry at all, and when I told her it was for my scrapbooking, she looked at me like I was even crazier.  Anyway, I have taken to using jewelry in several of my layouts this year.  I like the bling and I like that touch of nostalgia.  I have a friend who cleaned out her jewelry a few weeks ago, and brought me an entire bag of things to play with, and I plan to use things whole and in pieces on various pages.  One man’s trash…LOVE THAT!  This week will most likely have quick posts, because I am involved in a week-long online paper crop AND a digital crop contest, so if I can manage to do those two AND a blog post every other day, I’ll be pleased.  I’ll try to show some of my work of the day.