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Did you know I had a twin sister?

July 10, 2010 By 6 Comments

And I’m not talking about Hormona, (she only comes out to play once a month and if you don’t play by HER rules, she sulks or bites).

No, this is my glamourous twin who looks about ten years younger than I do.

Yeah, she’s a rock chick living in a beach house in Malibu, dating movie producers and running her own botox clinic …

Well, guess what, you could have your own glamorous twin – Lesley and I are running our Introduction to Photoshop course again in August (21st & 22nd) at Lesley’s training centre in Middlesbrough.  Bring your own photos and we will show you how to fade out the wrinkles and give yourself that ‘ten years younger’ look.

Now our other computing weekend course – (basic computing for crafters and introduction to blogging) was supposed to be happening this weekend, but couldn’t go ahead because we didn’t have enough people signed up.  So, we have transferred a couple of the ladies from that one to the Photoshop weekend and as there is plenty of space and two of us teaching, we are kind of merging the two courses into one and working side by side to ensure that all participants learn what they want to learn.  The original class was designed to take the fear away from using the computer and show how useful a tool it can be for a creative crafter.

The Photoshop class is suitable for anyone who wants to get to grips with this wonderful and versatile program, understanding the jargon and terminology that is used within Photoshop, learning how to resize and crop photos, working with filters and masks and lots more.  It will be particularly useful for anyone who wants to get started with digital scrapbooking (digiscrapping), graphic design or blogging.

The course runs over the weekend of Aug 21st and 22nd, 9.30am to 4pm.  Price is £100 all inclusive which includes a wonderful cooked lunch by David.  If you are interested you can book it online by clicking here, or call the office (01833 695958) and ask for Judith.

OK, that’s the shameless self promotion bit done with – I thought I’d put this up today because once again, there’s a severe shortage of crafting going on, though actually I did manage to do some backgrounds last night as I’m teaching a backgrounds class on Wednesday which is one I always love doing.  No bunnehs either, they’ve kept away today and hardly suprising with all the activity going on around here.

I’m onto my third car load of clutter.  Today I tackled the kitchen and what a lot of rubbish we’ve been storing for years.  I haven’t made fresh juice with my magimix juicer in about five years, nor have I used the electric citrus press, the liquidiser or the old food processor.  I have actually used the smoothie maker, the bread machine, the new magimix and the ice cream maker within the last two years, so they got to stay, though the bread maker is still under review.  I threw out drawers full of old receipts (shredded), old food magazines, weight watchers packs from about 8 years ago, candle stubs, odd mismatched ugly crockery, about a billion ramekins that once contained Gu puddings (no wonder we’re both the size we are!) and several teapots that have always dribbled, even the expensive Le Creuset one.

We filled my car and started on Adrians!

And how am I doing all this?  I get the impression from all the comments that you’d all like to declutter too.  I see some of you are having trouble with your other half not wanting to let go of stuff and from the sounds of it, most of you are happy to watch from afar, but find the thought of doing it yourself just too daunting to contemplate.

Well, I have got some tips on decluttering, which I’m going to save for another post, including top tips on getting your other half involved.

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Diptych Dreams

November 28, 2009 By 6 Comments

Our recent retreat attendees had one workshop called Diptych Dreams which was an arch shaped book with an Italian theme. My original was at the time winging it’s way back overseas from America as it had been photographed for a magazine interview in a magazine called Scrapbooking and Beyond. The interview was back in July when I was in Florida – seems like such a long time ago now.  The book and a copy of the magazine arrived here on Friday, so if there are any new blog readers who have found there way here as a result of that article, hello to you all and here are a few more photos of the book for everyone to enjoy. You can click on an image to go into gallery mode where you see an enlarged version and can scroll through them all.

I am not going to go into detail on how this is made as I will be teaching this again at our April retreat and it is one of those projects where there’s more to it than meets the eye.

For those of you who were on the retreat, I would LOVE to see how your finished books turned out, though I know this is the sort of thing that ends up taking time as you tweak it page by page. If you do get yours finished, please leave me a link to where we can see it, or email me some photos.

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Free Halloween Digi Kit

October 22, 2009 By 22 Comments

The usual rules apply.  This is a copyrighted image so you can use it yourself, but you can’t use it commercially, which means you can’t pass it on or sell the image.  You can show items you make with it on your blogs or photo sites, that’s fine.  You can even grab the thumbnail image below and put it on your blog to tell your friends that there’s a free download on offer, but they need to come here to download it for themselves.

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Copyright 2009 Glenda Waterworth. All rights reserved.

This is an 8×8 inch jpg file, so to grab it, simply right click, then left click on ‘save target as’ and you should be asked where you want to save it on your computer.  You will need a graphics program to open and print the file.  Mac users: ctrl click on the image and choose ‘save image as’.  Note, the paper doesn’t have the words on it.  They were done using the word art below.

These word art files are png files which is a format which allows a transparent background.  Again, you will need some kind of graphics package to use these, but the transparent background means you can lay them over the background and you won’t have a white box around the text.

You can grab each of these images in the same way as above.

spooky copy

halloween copy

bump copy

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I’d love to see what people do with it, so if you use it, please let me know, either by leaving a comment below or you can drop me an email.

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Basement Cat turns Thirteen

September 28, 2009 By 26 Comments

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If you are not a fan of I Can Has Cheezburger, then you might not get the joke here.  Basically, the site has evolved the concept of an enlightened higher being known as Ceiling Cat, who is always a white cat and his evil counterpart, Basement Cat who is nearly always portrayed as a jet black cat.

So naturally, one of Basil’s more recent nicknames is Basement Cat and faced with an abundance of Halloween products this year, I felt compelled to make this rather tongue in cheek album this weekend.

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The photos above have been ‘dramatised’ in photoshop, playing up the laser eye effect of the flash and saturating the colours.

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Basil is in fact 13 years old, though we don’t know exactly when he was born.  He was one of three born on a farm and discovered by a colleague of mine at the time who made it her mission to find them homes.  We believe his birthday is sometime in March.  He was a rather nervous kitten and it’s a source of some sadness that my wonderful 1960s Zenith camera broke down around that time and I have no photos of the boys as babies.

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I cut the pages slightly narrower than the back board so that I could alternate the binding side.

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The lettering is a mix of chipboard letters (Heidi Swapp) and various rub-ons.  Once upon a time, the boys were never allowed bed  privilege – it’s not nice being woken up by the sound of a cat throwing up on your cream carpet at four in the morning.  Nowadays we often enjoy a mutually lazy Sunday morning lie in.

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The pages are all coloured with Jack O’Lantern Glimmer Mist and decorated with rub-on vines.

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This is the back board – it’s grey board sprayed with a Cinder – one of the new Limited Edition colours in our new Pumpkin Spice Glimmer Mist set.  It really is a very dark black with just a hint of silvery blue mica.

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The album is made with a pair of gorgeous laser cut chipboard gates from ScrapFX.  They come with holes in, so it was a straightforward matter of cutting some card and a back board to fit, marking the holes and punching them with a Crop-a-Dile.

Behind the gates are two chip tiles from the Halloween Hauntings set – another Tattered Angels product.  These embossed tiles are 7″ x 4″ and make perfect little book covers.  I have sprayed them with a mixture of colours from the Pumpkin Spice set and enhanced the embossed designs with Distress inks and Gold Encore ink.

The gates are sprayed with Raven – a very dark purply blue – and finished with a couple of diamante brads and the number 13.

There is more journalling to do, I want to just get stuff down on paper about Basil so I don’t forget his quirky ways.

And talking of his quirky ways, he is definitely trying to tell me that my lap is missing from his sofa right now.  I’m on my way Basil, on my way.

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Wonderful Break

September 14, 2009 By 15 Comments

Well I’m back!  Did ya miss me?  Adrian and I took a few days off and went over to visit my Nanna in Carlisle.  She had a fall a couple of weeks ago and had to call for help because she couldn’t get up.  She seemed a lot older than she did just a couple of months ago when I saw her in July.  She seems to have gone from a fit, doing-well-for-her-age kind of 86 year old to a rather frail one and I confess to feeling a little sad about it.  I do wish we were a little closer to her so we could get over and visit more often.

From Carlisle, we headed round the corner and into southern Scotland.  We were so lucky with the weather – glorious crisp sunshine the whole time we were off.  While in the vicinity of Newton Stewart, we spotted this sign.

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Well, we were very intrigued to know what had been taped over, but the other signs showed the same mysterious blank.  Hmmm, any ideas?  Well read on as we did find another sign later and couldn’t resist taking a photo of it.

Back home, the other elderlies are also in need of a little TLC as well – Derrick isn’t feeling too good at the moment.  Breathlessness is his main problem, but he’s also starting to be sick again which is not a good sign.  They keep messing about with his medication and we’re just hoping they’ll get the balance right very soon.  We actually came back from Scotland after just one night and spent the rest of the time having days out nearby.

We had a great day out at Whitby, stopping in Yarm for a very scrummy lunch.  We did actually break the law on two counts in Whitby – we didn’t have fish and chips and we didn’t have ice cream!  Luckily the Whitby police didn’t catch us, I think we got away with it.

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No sign of Dracula today

Whitby has an interesting mix of shops – lots of nice gift shops with interesting bits and pieces for the home, jewellers, art galleries, tea shops and cafes galore, all interspersed with shops catering to the Goths who flock to Whitby for it’s association with Dracula. They even have Goth festivals which must be quite a sight to see.

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Seaweed (bladderwrack?) on the harbour walls

We really played the tourists and took a boat trip which meant I could play with my  long lens and get some shots of the Abbey from the sea.  Not bad for £2.00 each.

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Whitby Abbey

Today we are finally getting our new boiler installed.  We will be warm this winter – yay!  The guys are here right now, flushing out radiators and doing all that boilery stuff that boiler engineers do.  We had to run the oil in the tank down to empty before we could move it and about two weeks ago, the gauge was showing empty.  Talk about perfect timing – the Aga has been running on fumes for the last couple of weeks and finally petered out last night.

So, having waded through my mammoth backlog of emails that had built up, I am back in work mode and busy preparing our newest product line – SCRAPBOOK PAPERS!  Well, printed papers in general really.  I have three collections that I am working on at the moment: Spirit of Christmas which we previewed as 6x6inch paper packs at our recent open day; Simple Elegance – a good basic collection that will coordinate with lots of other things; and my favourite, Echoes of Italy – inspired by soft faded fresco colours and hand marbled papers – just yummy.

So, I’m sitting here thinking shall we do 12×12 or would people prefer A4.  What about 8×8 or 6×6.  A5?  Single sided or double sided?  Decisions, decisions…   I know we have one customer who hates double sided because it’s even  harder to stop stroking and start using when there’s two sides to choose from.

Anyway, feel free to let me know what paper size you would like most – they are all designed as 12×12 inches originally, so I can adjust them to anything really.

Meanwhile, here’s the other photograph from Scotland.

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Hmm, I can see why the plants are thriving!

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Winter Grunge

February 25, 2009 By 10 Comments

Well the new Tim Holtz stamps came into the office this afternoon, so naturally I had to, er, quality test them.  Yes, quality test, that’s the phrase.

So this is what’s been lying around on the table for a few days:

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pages from a Glimmer Glass Frosty album, coloured with Slate, Frost, Turquoise and Suede Glimmer Mists.

So I took Bahama Blue and Rich Cocoa Memento inkpads, plus my trusty black archival inkpad and set to with the one or two plates of Tim Holtz stamps that needed, er, tested.  I stamped out some wintery words on the first few pages in blue- winter, frost, snow – then stamped over those with a mixture of designs in black.

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These two pages use the set called Slight Alternatives in the background, it’s a collection of fab textures.  The one on the right uses Floral Tatoo and the Cirque Alphas set.

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We got lots of Urban Tapestry and Nature’s Discovery as we think they’ll be popular.

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Here’s how the pages are starting to shape up with some photos and journalling.

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The journalling card is from My Mind’s Eye.

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It’s not like me to stick to such a restrained colour scheme, I usually run riot with the colour, but I’ve enjoyed my own little version of the Graphicus challenge this month – it’s brick and teal, and it’s pictures of my home and garden in the snow this winter.

Well, I think those stamps have passed the quality test.  Now I’m off to test out the Studio 490 stamps from the talented Wendy Vechhi …

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Oh, and I did get the most scrummy brunch cooked for me on Sunday, including American breakfast potatoes with red peppers, onions and paprika – isn’t he just a star!  I could get used to this …

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