Layout by Maryse

I love how Maryse used her Forever Yours kit and my AquaStatic template to make this gorgeous layout! The photos are so incredible and rich in black and white. Her expressions seem to capture a moment in time. I love the treatment she gave to the edges and outlines, it adds a nice feeling to her LO and her elements add the finishing touch. Her use of the Forever Yours kit with this template adds such warmth and softness, yet a bit of sparkle too. Thank you Maryse for trying my template and for posting your layout on your blog and linking it back to mine.

Thank You

Thank you IKEA Goddess for posting my AquaStatic Template freebie on her blog. Thank you Maryse for creating a gorgeous layout using her Forever Yours kit with my template and posting it on her blog. I hope to post it later, when she gives me permission to do so. Pamela has been such an encourager and really inspired me to get it done. Your generousity of spirit has really touched me. I am awed, amazed and ecstatic about the wonderful response I have received from everyone. There have been over 300 downloads so far. I know it is a complicated template with many layers and options, yet Maryse put together an awesome layout with it with incredible speed. I want to send my best wishes out to Hilma and thank her for being my first encourager in blogdom. I hope you are having a wonderful weekend, I must get back to work and play with family! I also want to thank my Dad for buying the whole CS2 suite for me. I finally learned to use it, although I'm just scratching the surface of what is possible. Thanks again!

Happy Memorial Day Weekend

Good Morning! The air is sweet the birds are singing, even a happy tree frog is croaking! We've had a touch of rain this week and that makes everyone happy. Hope you are all having a wonderful long weekend and that you will stay well and happy. Be careful on the roadways too. My DS, age two is into everything now. He has taken all the milk, cream and juice containers out of the refridgerator to count them. He found the paper clips, he has sorted them by type and color and is counting them too. The counting is not quite there... but the joy is. He is an orderly type and likes to see completion. Unfortunately, his has decided orderly does not include putting toys away, just sorting them when you take them out LOL! Boys are so different than girls. My DD is eleven. Oh to be a tween again ...NOT! She is really sweet and seems to be more mature than I was at that age. Why can't girls love their hair? She has awesome hair too. We went shopping a couple of days ago and she is now wishing she had picked the tank top with bling. It's only 1.5 hours drive back to the store! That will be another OUT day. DH won the photo contest for the Florida State Parks contest posted this month. Go see it before the month ends. It was an awesome pic, you just don't see every day. Click the link above to see it! He has some more submissions this month too, voting for this month is almost over, so vote for what you like soon. I neglected to label my last post as a freebie, so I will do it here. Pamela mentioned that she could not post on my blog. I fixed that. The default settings did not allow unregistered users to post. That is why Maryse and Hilma could post and Pamela couldn't. I'm still learning here! FREEBIE is here. Password is swirl. I will take passwords off later.

My First Freebie!

Thank you Hilma, Maryse and Pamela for your encouragement and advice. Thank you IKEAGoddess for finding the freebies that inspired me to share. Thank you Andrea for inspiring me to create a template. Thank you Misty for creating tutorials on how to use templates, which led to figuring out how to make templates. After a huge learning curve, much fiddling and fussing I finally have my first freebie to offer. The template, preview and TOU are separate files in the Templates folder on my 4shared account. I would love to see your LO's! Please send me a link to your LO and I may post them here. The font in my LO is Duality from Larabie fonts, one of many free fonts from his foundry. Template AquaStatic is here!

Happy Mother's Day & My First Digital LO!

Good Morning! Happy Mother's Day! Well, I meant to post that sooner. I had a very nice Mother's Day with my family. My Mom passed away 17 years ago, she would be proud of her grandchildren, I'm sure. I am lucky to have them in my life! I finally finished my first digital LO! I created the papers using the butterfly wing pattern for texture and as a background. What a challenge! My first freebie will be this template. It is really different and I need to fix it up before I share it. We went on a field trip to a butterfly farm and my DD took all the photos with her Dad's awesome camera. It was a dreary day with high winds and the butterflies had been wind beaten, but the field trip was still awesome. They let us feed the butterflies with Q-tips dipped in Gatorade. They gave us caterpillars to take home. It was so cool watching them emerge as butterflies. Hugz

My First Sketch: Aquastatic

While cuddling with my DS (two yrs old), this sketch came to mind. When he fell asleep, I ran to sketch it out. It morphed as I sketched and finally I was content to stop. I scanned it and opened it up in PSCS2 with the intent of turning it into a template. I've never even made a digital LO and I didn't know how to make a template. I was using my magic wand and making layers like crazy, but I could not see any shapes or figure out how to make it do it. Searched for a tutorial on this, but I couldn't find one. In desperation I started the built in tutorial for beginners and voila... a clue came to light. I had to create a copy of the background which becomes layer 0. So, I started over and it worked. All seemed to be going well until I tried to use the template. All my papers were turned gray! I had posterized the image for clarity and crispness and the original was a b&w scan. Somehow I managed to convert it to color. It was two in the morning, so I'm not too clear on that part. Whoohoo, I have color now! I'm still working on the LO and the template. Isn't this one different? Hugz

Swirls & Whirls

Whirling, swirling ... smoke, wind and rain. Hoping that storm Andrea puts out the fires completely. I am hoping for more rain and less wind. I am not so close to the fires, but not far enough for my liking either. I got inspired to sketch a template. It has a whirling theme too! A very different looking type of template, but not simple enough for me to create it yet. First I must learn more about CS2. I sketched and scanned and fiddled about with the magic wand. Now I am actually doing a tutorial to figure out how to make this work. Good Night for now,

Welcome to my blog!

Every day is Finer, because you are in it. I am grateful for today, for those I love, those I know and those I will meet. I am a homeschooling mom of two beautiful, sweet, smart kids and I am lucky to see them more, because I homeschool. Welcome to today, appreciate it - while you can. Today is a "home" day. This is nice because we have been very busy. The air is filled with smoke. There are fires in a nearby town. My realtor and many of her employees live there. I hear my realtor had to move some of her cows. I guess you could say this is a small town. When I moved here we had one traffic light. Now we have two. We have one zip code and one phone exchange. I have dial-up :0 If I lived "in town" I could have DSL. It is wired at the end of our street, but they won't wire it to our street. LOL. I love to download beautiful freebies for digi-scrapping in Photoshop CS2. So I go into the nearest wifi hotspot and do it when I am in a bigger town. Silly maybe, but it brings me joy. We are moving when some lucky person buys our home. It is beautiful here. We have a gorgeous view of the lake, which does have water in it, unlike some of the lakes in our town. Our home has a huge atrium in it and an open feel which offers a view of the lake from nearly every room. We are sheltered under a canopy of oak, which are flanked by azalea bushes that bloom in a variety of colors in spring and some in fall too. I intend to learn photshop a bit better and create some freebies to share, so stop back by when you can. Have a wonderful day. Sincerely, Tasha "Be the change you wish to see" Ghandi