I recently bought some Hero Arts neon yellow ink pad and hadn’t tried it yet, so I used it to make a card. I based it off a sketch by Page Maps. 🙂

 

It’s a really fun color! I made a cloud by misting a cloud-shaped piece of vellum paper with Mister Huey’s Calico White. I love how it turned out, and I will certainly be misting vellum again!
The stamps I used are from a sold out set by Studio Calico, and the sun is from a Studio Calico mistable element sticker set on which I used the neon ink. I also stamped some letters and a star from the EK Success Image Tree typewriter alphabet. The base for the card is American Crafts white cardstock.

I was out last week (off to a conference, and DH came along!), and it’s good to be back home! I worked a bit on my Project Life week 23 today, then I made a tag for an online crop on Stephanie Howell’s blog. Fun! I’ll be using this for a birthday card for my dad. 🙂 Does that look like a birthday candle? I sure hope so! 😉

 

Here’s what I used: I started with a Cosmo Cricket tag (2WENTY-THR3E), and added some stamping. The alpha is my beloved Stepping Stone Alpha by Studio Calico/Hero Arts. The small asterisk in the circle is from an Amy Tangerine stamp set. I created the candle using a stamp from an exclusive Studio Calico set, embossed with clear inks (I used a Ranger Embossing Pen to color the chevron stamp – worked like a charm! – and the VersaMark pad for the ‘asterisk/flame’. 🙂 The embossing powders I used are Zing! Apricot, Zing! White and Zing! Mustard. Then I just added a couple of chipboard stickers from Cosmo Cricket.

I had a morning date at Starbucks with DH this morning. 😉

I’ll be at school till 9 PM so it was our only chance to do something together on Valentine’s Day. Plus, I really wanted to get their special Valentine cup (thanks Wilna!). 😉

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been talking DH into letting me buy RadLab. Why? Well, here’s my thought. I dislike photo editing. I have a bunch of free photo actions installed in my Photoshop, but end up running the same 2-3 all the time. I thoroughly hate having to run an action to know what it will look like, just to end up not liking it 95% of the time. It is such a huge loss of time. So when I heard about the new product by Totally Rad, RadLab, I immediately thought it was made for me: instead of running actions, you apply stylets to the photos. Technicalities aside, the point is that you get an instant preview of what your photo will look like, without having to wait for any action to run! Magic!! And the interface is really cool and easy to use. Anyway, the price is pretty steep for me (especially since I just confessed I don’t like to edit photos… 😉 ), so I’ve just been dreaming about it for a while. But then the people at Totally Rad (I guess the name didn’t come out of nowhere, huh? 😉 ) put out a 30-day trial of RadLab, so I went and installed it. It really is magic like it sounds. Here is the first example I ran. I started with a very crappy photo DH took of me last Halloween.

Yak. I just played around with the ‘actions’ I liked the most, and ended up with this:

Now, if I were to show it to DH, I’m sure he’d say that it looks a bit yellow. 😉 He’s unartistic like that. Umpf! 🙂 Honestly, though, I have never received so many comments in the gallery for my photo processing. Here are some of the comments I got in the galleries for this LO: “LOVE the effect on the photos – makes them look kinda spooky :)”; “[…] great photo effects too”, “This is beautiful! I love the edit on the photos! Great choice for the background paper.”; “This is awesome!!! Love the photo, love the patterned paper!”

Here’s the close up:

OK, let’s look at another example. It’s yet another horrendous photo of me taken by DH. Last year he botched all of the photos of my birthday, but I really wanted to salvage this one.

A few months back, I used a mish mash of actions to produce this result, of which I was (and still am) very proud:

Now, playing with RadLab, I came up with this instead:

Here are the close ups. Before (clearly! 😉 ):

After bunch of actions:

After RadLab:

The result is clearly over-processed to compensate for the awful picture (in fact there is plenty of color noise, especially on the dress, and what not), but I think I do prefer the RadLab result.What do you think? I asked DH and he also likes the RadLab edit best.

Speaking of crappy pictures, I also edited one of the pictures my mom took with her point-and-shoot during out train trip last May. Here’s the before:

And the after:

Pretty cool, huh?

As a last example, here’s how I edited a photo that was already pretty good. Before:

And after:

• I wish you could zoom in and out of the photo (there are only 2 options possible, full – which is way too close – or fit – which fits the photo to the screen). I’d like to be able to zoom freely like in Photoshop.
• I am not happy with any of the black and white actions. They all end up a bit dark. I probably just need to learn how to tweak them. And the cool thing is that once you’ve tweaked the actions as you see best, you can then save the recipe and reuse it in the future.

In conclusion, I have to say after just a few days of using it, I am totally sold on RadLab. The price is a bit high for my pocket, though, so I am hoping to score a Black Friday sale or something (fingers crossed!)…

I was picked for gallery spotlight at Weeds & Wildflowers! You can see a couple of LOs I made for the interview on the W&W blog. 😉

 

I had fun making these pages! 🙂

I cannot believe it! I was picked as one of the finalists of the Scrap Your Freakin’ Heart Out contest at the LilyPad.

I entered 2 LOs for this week, and what is most surprising to me is that I won with the one that received only very few comments in the gallery (the other one had literally 10x more comments!).

I know I don’t have a shot at the grand prize (sigh…) because the other two finalists in the Design category have made fabulous pages that really deserve to win, so I need to come to terms with the fact that I won’t get a guest spot at the store. 🙁 But winning that $30 gift card is pretty awesome, considering the incredible talent that I ‘competed’ against! Pinch me, I cannot believe it! 😉 And I’m super excited to be going shopping soon!! 😀

I’ve been playing in the Scrap Your Freakin’ Heart Out contest at the LilyPad in the past 3 weeks. I’ve had a blast! I really loved my week 1 page; I was pretty happy with my week 2 page also.
For the final week, I did this:

I loved the idea I had for this page (taking pictures in my backyard in a full 360 degree turn), but it’s a real pity that the pictures look so small in the 600 px web version! Plus, I botched the exposure in a couple of the shots, stupid me! Oh well. 🙂
It would be fun to do this again when the snow arrives, and then in spring when the leaves grow back, etc. Sounds like a nice plan! 😉

Since you can enter as many pages as you want in the contest, I also made this page, because I had been thinking for a while to document this, and this challenge convinced me it was just about time to do it. I’ll be printing this and putting it in my art journal.

So anyway, I didn’t win (so far… LOL… voting for this week hasn’t even started yet) but I am not really disappointed because there is some serious, amazing talent in the gallery and the people who have been chosen so far all really deserved it. But of course one can hope, right? 🙂
The prizes for this contest are just amazing. There are 3 weekly winners (one for Design, one for Photography and another for Journaling) and they each win $30 to the TLP store. The contest runs for 3 weeks, and after that one of weekly winners is chosen in each category to be the overall winner: and among other great prizes, the 3 overall winners get to be a guest CT for 1 month! So yeah, it’s not hard to see why I’d love to win. 😉

If you have some spare time, go check out the galleries for this contest. The pages there are just amazing!

We’ve been in this country 3 years and we’ve yet to carve a pumpkin. :/
Three years ago, DH was out of the country (for a 5 week trip nonetheless!) during Halloween. Two years ago, we went to a tea party at which they showed us how cool it was to carve your own pumpkin and we promised “we’ll carve a pumpkin next year!”. Last year, DH was busybusybusy so by the time we got around to looking for a pumpkin (Oct. 30th or thereabouts) they were all sold out. But this year, we made it! We secured our pumpkin! Now, I don’t know if we will actually get around to carving it, but at least it’s a step forward, right? 😀

I only accomplished about half of the stuff I’d been meaning to do this weekend. :-/
On the plus side: got a much needed haircut; came to the lab to take some pictures I need for a presentation; did the above LO; started the hybrid project for the Nov. ScrapMatters newsletter.
On the minus side: not finished the hybrid project for the Nov. ScrapMatters newsletter; not finished the 2011 calendar I need to get printed soon so it can get here in time for Christmas; not done a hybrid card I was hoping to squeeze in.
Why are weekends never long enough??

Anyway, I have some very very exciting news I’m really giddy about. I should be able to spill the beans soon! Stay tuned! 😉

Getting ready for Christmas with a fall page??? Yes, because I made this for the October page in my 2011 calendar, that I will give to our parents for Christmas as usual. 🙂 And since I loved the page (especially the blending of 2 papers for the background, isn’t it pretty? 😉 ), I turned it into a regular LO too:

I’ve owned this (and 2 others – pictured in the post below) brush alpha by Krystal Hartley for almost a year and hadn’t used it so far, for some reason (forgot about having it…….) – but it is SO pretty and versatile! I’m glad I dug it out again! 🙂 I love stamped alphas and having them as brushes makes them so much easier and quick to use. 🙂

Anyway, I’m down to 2 pages to go for my calendar, plus the cover. Now I’m hoping to find a good offer like the past 2 years to get them printed. And I need to order them quick so they can get here before my trip home for Christmas!

I was given the opportunity to scrap with a gorgeous new charity collab for breast cancer awareness put together by some of the designers at The Digichick. All proceeds from the sale of this kit will be donated to the American Cancer Society. And it is such a gorgeous kit!

All the lovely pink in this kit made me want to scrap a page about the most important woman in my life, my Mom. We live far away and I miss her a lot!

The journaling ended up being a bit too personal so I’ll work up a softer version before I show this to my mom. 🙂 I am sure she will love it!