trimmingthesails

W is for ...

• weekends and wishing I could have them all week (obviously)!
• whiling away happy hours with contented parents in a café and an art and craft exhibition
• whingeing about the upgrade to Apple's Lion operating system which means paying to get Snow Leopard first and then not using it :(
• winter house (a grandiose name for our little summer one), spring autumn-cleaning
• wondering how best to prepare for Journal Your Christmas/December Daily, and whether to
• wasting time looking for photos on my hard drive and fretting at my lack of consistent labelling
• working out the shape of the week ahead, and how to weave my way through it (gracefully if possible!)
• wandering companionably across the hills with Himself in the last of the October sunshine ...

What's your week ahead looking like? Wishing you a wonderfully creative start. :)

It's a wrap ...

... on this particular sketch idea at least. Thank-you for reading along with Toying With A Template for the last two weeks, and for your comments and encouragement. It has been great fun playing around with one simple idea; turning layers on and off, slipping photos and journalling into different spaces, printing out journalling and/or photos and adding papers or embellishments. Here's a quick overview of where we've been:

Like to see the little chap middle left, a little bigger? I couldn't resist doing something with this photo. It was one of those scenes you are snapping quickly when someone in it moves: and you don't realise what you've got till you open it later. Here he is, up close and a little more personal:

And it only took fifteen minutes from start to finish - the beauty of a structure. Should you have missed any of the downloads, they're here (layered template and Help pdf), here (template in different sizes) and here (overlays).

Hoping there's been something in it for you too: a dollop of enjoyment, a smidgen of inspiration, or a wisp of You-know, I-could-give-this-a-go ... If you do, please let me know. :)

As they say in the theatricals: thank-you very much everyone - it's a wrap! See you next week?

(Added for M)

Download AlexaTemplate12x12.psd

 

 

The tipping point ...

I guess we can never know just where the tipping point lies, until we get to the point where we, well, tip. It's been one of those wobbly days here where you can never quite sure of anything and solid ground is hard to find. Were I an art journaller, I might have got my pencils and paints out later in the day; but an ink and some letter stamps on a piece of white card was as good as it got. Tipping a template sideways worked too ...

Thank-you for your all your positive feedback this week and I am delighted the wellies were a hit. I'm pondering another page where a little strip of them might support the title "Giving it some welly!" (starring Himself who sports a grand pair in the garden), and is a phrase whose origins I don't think I had quite fully understood until I read this. Equilibrium is being restored here and I don't know about you, but I am looking forward to getting over the tip of midweek hill and freewheeling down to Friday!

High tech, low tech ...

... and everything-inbetween-tech - that just about captures it, for we are nothing if not eclectic up here! An own-made digital overlay on top of the photo plus a little digi-play resulting in a strip of coloured wellie-boots, added to another variation on the template - and a Sizzix-cut capital letter and a few inches of embroidery thread stuck down with a quick swipe of Herma ...

Gladys is doing the honours here. As you can see, her 'hair' is growing apace and has had to be tucked back - if not behind her ear. then behind her ... but I digress:

If you ....

• print your photos at home
• like to print your journalling directly onto your layout
• sometimes print your journalling onto a piece of card and add patterned paper, photo(s) and embellishments in the time-honoured way
• fancy an overlay to act as a frame for your handwritten journalling
• are a fully-fledged digi-only scrapper

... then please do help yourself to the zipped file below. You'll find three overlays in there - one with the gap right (as above), the gap left, and the gap centred; and if you're not familiar with recolouring and resizing png files, I've added a help file.

AlexaOverlaysArrows

Right, time for Gladys and I to have a close encounter with a pair of scissors, I think :). The week ahead is going to be full, with work, appointments and visitors. I'll be needing Sian's lovely poster and competition entries on my own staircase! How's your week shaping up?

Rounding the corner ...

... in our L-shaped kitchen, there's a wooden stool tucked between two cupboards near the warmth of the oven. Mum has adopted it as a favourite place to perch while I'm preparing food, or we're having a go at some baking together. She'd never let me take a photo of her, of course, but Bear has chivalrously stepped up in her stead - though he was re-christened Kipper by our little grandson during his visit. (Mind you, I think Bear is still so grateful to be rescued, he really doesn't mind.) So here's the spot where Mum was ...

... when my kneading the dough took us back to a childhood memory about buying yeasted bread in the village (for soda and wheaten breads would have been baked at home on the farm). It wasn't particularly important or consequential as stories go, and there was no outcome or punchline. It was one of those bread-and-butter family stories - ones which don't look wonderfully exciting from the outside, but have little grains of other things in, are not very big or important in themselves, but still are rich in flavour. Here's how it turned out:

Rounding corners with paper punches or digitally is always a favourite of mine, so I've created an arrow-tipped overlay for this template, and I'll pop it up next week for downloading (along with some tips for recolouring and resizing) if you'd like a copy.

Somewhere just of of sight there's a warm loaf and some pale golden butter awaiting - and the way Himself is edging towards the kitchen door, I don't think it will be awaiting much longer ... Hey! Stop right there, Beloved! Got to go ... wishing you a happy and creative weekend. :)

Playing around with ... purple? (2)

 

The silence on the other end of the phone is telling. "Purple? You're hemming a purple skirt?". I know! And if you'd told me a few weeks ago, I'd have spluttered in my chai. But there you go: the beauty of opening doors inside oneself and peeping in. Helped hugely by Julie, whose wonderful purple posts have been the little prompting voice (go on, I dare you ... think outside your little box ...), I have been playing with the template I posted last Friday and Monday to celebrate:

Colour the backgorund (or mount onto Kraft), and lengthen the top strip on one. Turn off the border mat and add a few paint splashes in the other ... same template, same photos, same colourways, different looks. Both of these can be purely digital or both could be hybrid. That's one of the beauties of using a template: lots of possibiities. I don't think I'm quite done exploring all the potential variations of this one yet! Any guesses as to how many? Oh, and the additional pdf for Text Help with the Template 03 is right here:

AlexaTemplate03TextHelp

Should you be a purely paper and card scrapbooker, eschewing anything digital, I am hoping the ideas next week might just persuade you there could possibly be something of interest and use to you in digital :).

Off to finish the phone conversation - I think I've left her hanging in stunned silence long enough!

For my transatlantic and antipodean blogfriends ...

Apologies. I was remiss in not posting Monday's template in sizes other than A4. You may already know how to alter and resize templates but if not, here it is in 8x10 inches and 8.5x11 inches :). Oh, and an expanded version for 12x12-ers. I promise to be more mindful in future!

AlexaTemplate03(8x10)
AlexaTemplate03(8.5x11)
AlexaTemplate03(12x12)

 

Playing Around with a Template (1)

Hello and welcome! Up here the light has softened to pale gold, the hedgerows are shading into gentle taupe and grey, and the spiders are busy...

As I have been, too! Here, as promised is a template for playing around with, along with some pdf. help for Photoshop Elements. It focuses on the photo spaces, and there'll be another pdf on the text spaces on Wednesday (and both of of these for Photoshop users by the end of the week). Do email if anything is not clear and I'll do my very best to help. If you're a confident digital diva, you will probably not need the Help file at all. I'm going to be playing around with it myself over the next week: I love the way a limitation seems to stimulate creativity! My experimenting has started with turning off some of the layers from last week to arrive at something even more simple ...

... which I think I actually prefer. But I'd be glad to hear what you think! So, here are the files:

AlexaTemplate03
AlexaTemplate03HelpAndTOU

Thank-you for all your lovely feedback last week. :) And now you just need to click and play!

Toying with Templates ...

It has been playing on my mind, rolling around in my psyche and teasing my brain cells. That leaflet from the Deutsche Museum (bottom row) has a lot to answer for. Rife with scrapbooking design possibilities, it has eventually popped out as a template looking like this. There's another version lurking on my hard disk with squared off (rather than rounded) edges on the top and bottom strips. Mmm, that's three spaces for photos, journalling, paper, and embellishments, strips at the top could be solid or patterned ... There might even be a bit of doodling ...

There are some of you, I know, hovering tentatively on the edge of digi-dipping, in a  "I really must ... one day ... when I've got time ... " kind of a way. If, across a couple of posts, I offer a layered template and graded help for using it in Photoshop and Elements, might that be useful? Plus, of course, some ideas for using a template like this for determinedly paper-and-scissors scrapbooking?

I've already been having a play, with a distinctly blurry picture from last weekend. Babies are not good at staying still I'm not very good at taking photos. "Can't you see it?" I said. Himself peered. "Err, what am I looking at?" he ventured. I was a little testy: "He was sitting on his Mum's hip when she swung round. You mean, you can't see his little arm and hand, and the sleeve of the christening robe?" There was a long pause. I waited hopefully. "Nope", he said firmly, "I see an amoeba". I'm putting it down to his angle of vision but he may, alas, be right. Still, you get the idea - there are possibilities in this template.

And even if you decide it's not for you, I hope you'll pop back to see how it's going. I might even have some photos which are blur- and amoeba-free. :)

A sketchy post ...

... in more ways than one :). There's something about October that signals a settling-in for autumn, a wanting to hunker down with paper and pen before an evening fire, with early evening light and misty rain beyond the window - I can feel some sketching coming on. Not that I can actually draw, you understand: I'm a doodler, as you'll see from the mail art that went from here to the wonderful Ginger (arriving successfully, this time!). And I do love a browse through freebie magazines for some layout ideas: the ones below are making my pen twitch with anticipation. A mini-booklet like the one from the museum, variations on a theme based on the Lufthansa check-in article, and a scrapbook page with lots of room for journalling plus a single bright photo ... It's time for some more templates. Bear with me while I sort the unpacking, the washing and the catching-up-on-post: I will be back!