Black Friday Sales NOW!

Happy thanksgiving to my friends in the States, and happy Thursday to everyone else :)  I'm taking a break from cooking to tell you about my shop sale.  This is the big one!  Black Friday/ Cyber Monday is the only sale that goes to 50% off across the board, including bundles, so it's a great time to plump up your stash.  Not unlike the plumping I did of that turkey in my kitchen just a couple of hours ago :)  I've added in my entire inventory of Christmas kits to my Digichick shop and the coordinating templates; there's also a nice selection of goodies in the $2 Chick Blitz category, so it's a good chance to plump up your stash. And here's a sampling of the kits I added this week: Now you will excuse me, because it's time for PIE and a little shopping of my own.  I am so grateful for internet shopping (and so are my feet!) You can  visit my shop HERE, and until next time, happy scrapping! Julie

New Kit. New Freebie. Old me.

I hope you don't mind - I've abandoned all hope of having a professional, smooth, sophisticated presentation of new product.  It just isn't me, LOL.  I'm all lumps and bumps and wry grins, so from here on out it will be just me.  :D 

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First off, let me say how much I love this palette for Thanksgiving - it's so cheerful and bright and uplifting to me.  And that's what thankfulness should be, right?  It's also refreshing to have color when possibly the vegetation outside the window has  lost every color but brown.

My love affair with gold continues.  You probably noticed.  My addiction to shiny is still intact.  I am unrepentant.

Also prominent are feathers - I'm studying Psalm 91 lately and feathers are so meaningful to me - "He will cover you with His feathers and under His wings you shall trust..."   They also make nifty cutouts for hybrid projects (I still can't believe that the words "Hybrid project" come out of my mouth, but there you have it).  If I manage to get one done for this kit I'll show pix, I promise.

There are also extra bits:



And templates:



I love my turkey.  There, I said it.  I'm going to find a family photo and put it in there even if it isn't a Thanksgiving photo, because let's face it, we are all a silly bunch of turkeys and it will completely make me smile when I see it.  However, if your family is proper and non-birdlike, there's a regular version, too, LOL.  Plus a multi-photo page which helps make a dandy two-page layout.  All of these have strategic stained-glass inserts, but those are optional; you can shut them off and substitute papers or photos or whatever.  And of course, if you aren't addicted to shiny and gold, you can clip a paper to the frame.  I'll still love you.

I'm lucky to have some beautiful examples to share with you as well:






I feel so blessed to see these beautiful layouts with my kit.  I hope they inspire you for your own creating!

Two other items of business - I'm the featured designer at The Digichick this month, and there's a cute little Layout Starter kit there for you to scrap with (and I'd love it if you posted it in the thread and got some headpats for yourself, too!)  You will notice that some of the above examples use the template.  I mean, it has gold.  Just sayin'.

Business item number two - it has been a shocking long time since I have had a freebie, so I have a special little add-on for you:



I hope you find it useful :)  I have every intention of printing the cards.  Will I follow through?  We'll see LOL.  You can download the lot HERE.

Alrighty then.  That's it for me this week.  The Faith Project - A Grateful Heart will be at the introductory sale price through Monday.  And if you want it all and want to save extra $$ there's a bundle, too :)  Have a great week, and happy scrapping!

Julie

Template Talk

I have several sets of templates returning to my shop this week - some of my favorites.  And it occurred to me that it might be interesting for you to have an idea of why I make templates the way that I do, and some of the things you can do with them. 




I'll preface all of this by saying that I started making templates for myself and my scrapping style.  It's no secret that scrapping is my first love, and I do scrap with my designs - maybe it's more accurate to say that I design for my scrapping, LOL!  And I found that while I liked using a template sometimes, I had no patience for a lot of element placement - to me that's the fun part and so I would delete all the elements first thing.  Which left photos.  And often I was only starting with a two or three photo template so it always seemed like I was duplicating photo spots and then figuring out where to add them in.  You might be thinking to yourself, why use a template at all?  That thought did eventually occur to me LOL.  But the thing is, I like to scrap with several photos because I seem to think I need to use most of the decent (used very loosely in this instance) photos that I take because they all portray some detail I wanted to capture and remember.  And my idea of decent is a little iffy - not very many can hold up to much scrutiny if they are large and in charge on my page ;)  Finally, I decided to start with a blank slate and make my own sort of template - photo placement being prominent.  That was when my photo cluster line originated.  Sometimes I like to mimic the look of my mother's old photo albums, with the white-edged photos.  Sometimes I prefer a cleaner look without the edges.  Sometimes I want to put a narrow frame around the photo to help my eye make sense of the layout.  So my photo clusters have "photoedges" for each photo spot that can be left in place, turned off, or have a paper clipped to them and a shadow added for a framing effect.



Note that the "Taped" clusters can be moved wherever you like on your page.  (Thanks to Karen Robinson for the Trick or Treat layout, and Dawn Inskip for the owl example)


And in this one, I used one of the mini clusters at the top, and then a blended photo on the main page.  This is also a good way to disguise a less-than-picture-perfect photo LOL.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas, in case this sort of tool is something you'd like to have in YOUR scrapping stash.  I love that I can re-use them and have a completely different look every time  :)

Big Picture 3 and the entire set of Taped Photo Clusters (available separately or in the bundle) will be at the introductory sale price through Monday in my Digichick shop.  Happy Scrapping!


Julie