Woman on a mission!

Super quick catch up warnng, as I am a woman on a mission at the moment!!

SP for October weren't a resounding success but I am still pretty proud. I got four out of the six pages done which was pretty good I guess, so I still have two to do until the book is finally finished!!

And now I have a sign from above that I MUST finish the last two pages this weekend. A 40% off 12x12 photobooks voucher from Snapfish is sitting in my inbox, and considering your usual 15 pager is normally $65 (no, I am not even guessing how much my 34 page extravaganza is going to cost me!!) it seems like perfect timing. So my goal is to get these pages done and all uploaded and sent off by the end of the weekend - wish me luck!

Will update everything else as soon as that's done ;)

Tiptoeing for nothing

I am having a total 'me' day today. We have a day off work due to the show and the Monkey is still at childcare considering it seems to muck up her routine if she misses her one day a week there. And we have to pay for it anyway, so it was a good opportunity for me to get a little down time which has been in very short supply lately!

It is very strange though,while it is nice to have a few hours to myself, I keep tiptoeing around the house as if she is having a nap and I don't want to wake her. Old habits die hard I guess.

But I have used my time well I think, to catch up on some of that digiscrapping that I have been meaning to get to!

So here are today's efforts so far.

The fun of yoghurt

Another Jessica Sprague tutorial that can be found here. She has used it as a hybrid technique but mine is all digital.

It's a simple effect but I quite like it. I am a bit annoyed though, i would have liked to muck around with it more and maybe lessen the gap between photos but my computer had PMS. This was just my first play around without papers and so on anyway, but I think I will do a proper page with these photos and this technique to follow it up.

Just Hatched

I love Spring and everything that goes with it, it is easily my favourite time of the year. Even now I am counting the days till the end of the cold weather is in sight, and just seeing the first cherry blossom the other day reminds me that it is slowly getting closer.

Originally I wanted to scrap these photos with more of a family focus, but I saw this gorgeous kit and just had to use it! When I started it I was using it because of the 'Just Hatched' theme, considering the Monkey was only 3 weeks old when we had these photos done, and she was also wearing her 'Just Hatched' Bubblebubs nappy at the time. But in making this page I moved it more toward a Spring focus as well, considering the photo shoot was done at the start of Spring, and of course at the start of our little girl's young life.

Kit can be found at Nitwit Collections, I absolutely love the kits from this store - adorable!!!

My brown eyed girl

Started in Photoshop Stoneage and finished in Photoshop Shiny! Much excitement.

Very excited!

Since I started dabbling in digiscrapping about a year ago, I have been managing to teach myself a fair bit using Photoshop Elements. I have come to love many things about this program and it's ability to not only edit photos easily, but also to create digiscrap pages that I can be proud of!

That said, the version I have been using up until now is version 2. To give this some sort of reference point, this program came free with our computer. Which we bought when we got married. Over six years ago now!!

Ideally I would absolutely love to buy a new computer and have something decent to be working with, but unfortunately with me working part time this isn't a huge priority right now. But I have been toying with the idea of seeing if I could at least upgrade our version of PSE so I can start doing more of the tricky things I would like to do in the world of digiscrapping.

I wasn't sure if our computer would even support the new version of PSE, but today I downloaded the free trial of PSE 7 with much hope and excitement. And many exciting things ensued:

1) It worked!!
2) So many things are in similar places, so I didn't freak out about not knowing what I was doing
3) The new format makes so much more sense! You can see previews of the effects you want to try, scroll through fonts with your chosen text to try them out on the page (this step alone used to take me forever on my stoneage version!), and they are only the first couple of things I noticed in the first few minutes.

I love that they haven't reinvented the wheel since version 2, just added so many features that make it much easier to use, as well as being able to customise things that you wouldn't dream of in the old version.

And yes, it's probably pathetic to be excited over this, but damn it I am! I love digiscrapping already but can only imagine the possibilities with the new improved version.

The other bonus is I was looking at possibly paying $150 plus for PSE 7 if I was going to purchase it, but I currently have a 30 day trial which will take me past my birthday, so guess what this little black duck is asking for! And I have noticed we can just class it as an upgrade because we have a stoneage version, and there is a redemption code as well, so we should be able to purchase the new shiny version for under $100!

Very happy :)

Little Miss Serious

I still remember taking all of these photos over the space of a few minutes and pissing myself laughing at the outcome. The Monkey was only a couple of months old at the time, and had just started to give us a few brief smiles. I was determined to capture one of them on film - and this was all I got!! Some of her expressions were priceless, I have no idea what was going through her head but either way she wasn't pleased about it I don't think. If that's her reaction to the camera we may have to cross 'Supermodel' of her list of intended occupations ;)

I love these shots though because they capture so clearly what she was like as a little baby - so very serious! Her expressions weren't usually this animated but she always looked like she was thinking about something, and taking everything in around her. Fortunately the Monkey found her sense of humour and sense of fun big time at around eight months, and now she is constant smiles and giggles.

I guess it just took her a few months to reserve her judgement on us all.

Anyway, onto the page. This is a really different one for me, I usually steer away from bold colours but I think they suited the theme well. I used layered overlays to get the colours rather than recolouring the photos, and I think this technique worked much better.