Scrapbook & Cards Today Blog

Jenni Bowlin Studios giveaway!

Happy Good Friday!  In honour of this special day we have a special giveaway!  This week we had Celeste Smith joining us and as a design team member with Jenni Bowlin Studios, Celeste was kind enough to arrange for a fabulous givaway from JBS just for you!  We have always loved Jenni Bowlin and her fabulous products - a vintage haven! 

 

One lucky winner will receive the JBS Mercantile March Papercrafting Kit which features their latest release, "Be Our Guest!"  Your kit will contain the following:

6 double sided JBS papers
1 JBS Die Cut paper
2 Bazzill Cardstock
2 sheets Exclusive Mercantile JBS Paper
1 set JBS Journaling Cards
1 JBS Flag Banner Sticker Sheet
1 JBS Red Kindergarten Alpha Rub-on Sheet
4 pink and blue scallop notecards
1 “Cutlips”Ice cream Top
1 small Lucky Black JBS Bingo Card
1 Exclusive Recycled notebook
1 Exclusive Mercantile Stickers Tab Sheet
1 Exclusive Mercantile Large Bingo Card Month

How fabulous is that?  If you would like an opportunity to win this beautiful kit, just leave a comment below before 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 28!  And if you would like to keep in touch with Jenni Bowlin Studios, why not hop over to their facebook page right here!  Be sure to tell Jenni SCT sent you!

So let's announce the winner of our great Harmonie giveaway from last Friday...

sorry I'm missing the Creativ Festival this Spring. Hope to see you in there in the Fall again though. LOVED the make'n'takes last time. Thanks for the chance to win!  Posted by: Alycia | April 15, 2011 at 02:08 PM

Thank you Alycia!  Send us your information to ideas@scrapbookandcards.com and we'll send that to Harmonie!   A special thank you to all our SCT readers that joined Harmonie on facebook!

Have a wonderful weekend everyone...may we all find a little chocolate around our houses!

~ Catherine

Easter themed submissions!

As we head into the Easter weekend, we wanted to share some of our readers Easter themed submissions with you!  We love to show off how talented our readers are!  Enjoy!

 

 
Ann Corbiere-Scott

 

Cassandra DeGrace

 
Bellaidea

 
Cindy Stevens

 
 
Joan Demers

 
Karen Kepner

Thank you ladies for sharing some great Easter themed projects!  We would love to feature more on Saturday so if you would like to send something to us, send it to ideas@scrapbookandcards.com and put "Easter" in your reference line! 

Have a wonderful day!

~ Catherine

 

 

 

Spring Word Art with Celeste Smith!

Designer Celeste Smith is back with us today sharing some beautiful Easter projects featuring some digital designs and a few giveaways too! 

"I enlisted the help of a couple of my digital designer friends so I could provide you with a couple of free downloadable spring art work. First up is the fabulous Becca Bonneville of Tickled Pink Studio. Becca created this lovely spring word art with a fantastic blue and green color palette.

 

Download Here

What's great about word art is that it's easy to use it on either digital pages or hybrid pages. Here I decided to create a digital page about spring.

 

Supplies: Word Art by Tickled Pink Studios, Cardstock (Good Mother Kit by Jennifer Barrette at Sweet Shoppe Designs, Border (Chrissy W's Paper Cutters at Two Peas in a Bucket), Life is Sweet kit by Tickled Pink Studios (Two Peas in a Bucket), Baker's Twine (Spendid Fiins at jessicasprague.com) and Font (Another Typewriter, dafont.com)

I try to go for a real paper look for my digital pages. I added some blocks of paper and interspersed them with spring photos. The word art, some journaling and a simple piece of twine finish off the page.

The second set of word art is from Ashley Meek of Hazel Olive.

 

DOWNLOAD HERE

I felt Ashley's word art really lent itself to card making. It's really easy to print either of these word art sets out. Simply open Microsoft Word and select Insert>Picture. Then find the picture on your hard drive. Once the picture is showing, you can right click on it and resize it however you'd like. I printed my word art on textured cardstock, some might print better on smooth cardstock or matte photo paper.

 

Supplies: Jenni Bowlin Studio 1st Quarter Dime Store Kit.

Once I printed the word art,I cut it out of my cardstock. I used a scrap of green cardstock and a set of shredding shears to make grass. For the little eggs, I found an egg shape in Google Images and then resized it and printed it using Microsoft Word on white computer paper. I simply adhered little pieces of patterned paper to the back of each egg and hand cut them out. A simple Easter card that packs a punch!

-Celeste Smith

Be sure to read our interview with Celeste and where she finds inspiration HERE!  A special thank you to Celeste for joining us this week.  She also has a special surprise for all of you on Friday...just sayin!  Also, if you have not left a comment for the chance to win our Harmonie prize package featured HERE, be sure to do that before tomorrow at 6:00 p.m.!

  

Easter Tags with Paula!

Easter is just around the corner and wouldn't it be nice to have custom tags to put on your Easter baskets?

 

The hybrid technique I'm using is to place the text in a circle- I did mine in Photoshop but I'm providing instructions on how to do this in Word, PSE and Photoshop.

In Word:

Click on “insert WordArt” icon
Select the sample that looks like an arch; Type in the text you want.
Your text will display as an arch in your document. Make sure the WordArt tool bar is visible when you have clicked on the image (check View, Toolbars, Wordart).
On the tool bar click on the “abc” icon - “WordArt shape”. You should see several different shapes. Select the one that looks like the letter O to put your text in a circle. You can resize it like you would any other image.

In Photoshop:

First select the ellipse shape tool (right below the text tool in the tool box), and hold down the shift key and drag, if you want a perfect circle. You can also specify a size along the top bar by selecting Style - Fixed Size in the drop down box and entering the size. I used 1.125 for the width and height so I could use my circle punch to cut them out.
Right mouse click and select Make Work Path from Selection (hit ok)
Select the Horizontal Text tool and click along your circle shape.
Type your text -- it will follow the circle.
You can copy the text layer by holding down the Alt key and dragging the layer to another location. I printed mine out on a sheet of cardstock like this:
 
In PSE:
Text in a circle is a little tricky in Photoshop Elements. The way I have done it is by creating two separate semi-circles as follows:

Select the text tool and type your text. You can then warp your text using the "Create Warped Text" option - on the far right of the toolbar.
Select Arc, Horizontal with set the bend to 100. This will create the first half of your circle.
Repeat the process for the second half and rotate that half by 180 degrees.
There are other ways of faking it but I prefer the method above. Another option for PSE is to use text path templates like Pattie Knox's from Designer Digitals: Text Bytes-Shaped Text Templates 01

Have a wonderful Easter!

~ Paula 

Designer Challenge with Celeste Smith!

Happy Monday!  We hope everyone had a great weekend.  For those of you who joined us at the Creativ Festival...it was great to see you.  We always love the opporunity to meet our readers and we hope you enjoyed all the fun projects and make n' takes.  What a fun filled two weeks it has been with both ScrapFest and the Creativ Festival.  We can't wait to see everyone again in Toronto and Oshawa in the fall.

Looking ahead to this week we have a fun filled week on the SCT blog.  Joining us today and Wednesday is Celeste Smith whose artwork and style we adore.  And, lucky for you, Celeste has even offered some great free downloads for you! 

"Hey there! I’m so excited to be the guest designer this week on the Scrapbook & Cards Today blog. Pinch me!  This year I’ve made it a goal to read 100 books. Yes that’s right 100 books, work full time, and keep up with my scrapping too. A little ambitious maybe? So far I’m on track to make it, barely. My son, Adam is joining me and he’s having a much easier time of it. He’s been reading up a storm. In order to document his love of reading, I decided it was high time I put together a layout about it.

 

I knew I wanted to include some book paper on my page so I dug into my stash and found a packet of vintage papers from Jenni Bowlin Mercantile. I had a lot of choices in the pack, but I was drawn to this dictionary page because I had already decided my title would be devour and this page is actually one of the DE pages! Fun!

 

Of course, I couldn’t start my page without the kraft cardstock base, it is my go-to choice lately. Selecting the rest of my product was a breeze, I simple dug into my Jenni Bowlin Mercantile April Kit  and pulled product from there. The colors in the kit look great with the yellowed book paper! I added the yellow block to ground my elements then strips of papers from the kit – the blue paper is actually Pink Paislee packaging and the green is tissue paper! I spiced up the wooden alpha title by replacing the letter O with a wooden button threaded with some ribbon. I decided to journal on a manila tag and used a typewriter like font to go along with the vintage book paper. I printed my journaling on regular white computer paper, then I adhered the tag to the paper and ran it through the printer again.

 

So here’s my challenge to you. Find some paper that has text on it – it could be vintage book pages or it might be new scrapbook product – and incorporate the paper into a layout, card or project.

If you don’t have any in your stash, you can visit one of these sites and print some!
Pugly Pixel
http://www.puglypixel.com/2010/05/16/free-clip-art-paper-buffet-all-you-can-eat/

Agence Eureka
http://bibigreycat.blogspot.com/

The Graphics Fairy
http://graphicsfairy.blogspot.com/

Just Something I Made
http://justsomethingimade.com/2010/09/free-vintage-digital-images/

Percy & Bloom
http://www.percyandbloom.com/the-vintage-moth/2010/9/11/antique-ledger-pages-free-images.html

Be sure to come back here and link up your projects so I can see what you create!  I’ll be back this Wednesday to share a couple other projects  with a couple of downloadable freebies that you can use on a digital page or print to make a hybrid one! Until then, happy crafting!

-Celeste Smith

To learn a little bit more about Celeste, be sure to visit our website HERE where we have asked Celeste a few questions and asked her to show us her favourite layout right now!

Harmonie giveaway!

Happy Friday all!  This weekend we are at the CreativFestival in Toronto and if you are planning to attend (including those that won our free tickets!) we hope you will stop by to see us and participate in some of our great make n' takes and browse through our new product showcase. 

However, if you can't make it how about a great giveaway?  At our last CHA show Becky and I stopped by the Harmonie booth and I can tell you we were not disappointed!  As we looked around the booth (mouths slightly open), we fell in love with Harmonie's amazing collection of patterned papers, cardstock, embellishments not to mention their ribbons, acrylic albums, wood veneer shapes, embossing powders and hundreds of beautiful stamps too.  Of course, since we are the sharing kind, we just had to share a little Harmonie with you too!   Look what they have for one lucky SCT reader...

 

 

One lucky winner will receive a selection from the Fable de la Fontaine collection (love that name!) along with a selection from the Rocco collection too!  This prize package is valued at over $60!   Of course, we asked them if they have a facebook fan page and guess what, if you head over to their fan page and "like" them, you will be entered to win a second prize package!  So leave a comment here before 6:00 p.m. on Thursday, April 21st and then head over to Harmonie's fan page and leave a comment there letting them know SCT  sent you.  Good luck!

Before we go, let's announce last week's winner of the Studio Calico and Helmar giveaway...

Oh my goodness 2 of my favorite companies I would do a back flip over this prize JUST WOW! Crossing fingers super tight on this one. Thanks for the chance!  Posted by: Ellie A. | April 08, 2011 at 11:21 AM

Ellie, we are hope you are ready to do some back flips!  Just send us your address to ideas@scrapbookandcards.com and we arrange to have that prize sent right out to you! 

Well, we are off to the Creativ Festival!  Have a wonderful weekend everyone!  We've got a great week next week so be sure to join us on Monday morning.

~ Catherine