Freebies, Freebies, and a brand new scrapping site...

You may know that I am on the design team for Owl Tree Studio, a digital scrapbook kit club. The design team has put together an incredible August lineup (while you check it out on Facebook, go ahead and like OTS so you stay up to date on all things OTS and important) and the creative team has put together some incredible quick pages, blog posts, scrap challenges and page templates for you to enjoy.

As we get closer to opening day, the Owl Tree Studio crew wants to give you an opportunity to try them out for FREE.

That’s right...F-R-E-E!

On Sunday, August 1st, 2010 Owl Tree Studio plus each of the three resident designers will be giving away free memberships to Owl Tree Studio. You can enter to win as many times as you want between now and July 31st, 2010 at 10am (EST). Everyone’s contest rules are different, so you’ll have to visit each designers’ blog to find out exactly what you have to do to enter their portion of the giveaway.

Enter to win a free membership from the official Owl Tree Studio blog by:

Following OTS on Facebook - 1 Facebook follower will win a free 1 month membership

Follow OTS on Twitter and ReTweet:

"Follow @OwlTreeStudio & RT this for a chance to win a free month of great digital scrapbooking goodies http://bit.ly/aib6cA #digiscrap"

- 1 Twitter follower will win a free 1 month membership

Join the mailing list (and get a free beach themed digi kit) - 2 mailing list subscribers will each win a free 3 month membership

Sometimes, the studio owls get a little over excited and rumor has it one commenter on the Owl Tree Studio blog contest post might win a 1 month membership as well.

Follow OTS on Facebook; and Twitter AND join our mailing list for the biggest chance of winning, then visit the incredible designers’ blogs to pick up more chances to win through the designer contests!

[Fine print: Winners will be selected using Random.org. You can only win one time. If you win, you will have to sign up as a paying member to continue accessing the OTS members’ area AFTER your free membership period ends].

I'm on a CT!

For those who don't know, a CT is a 'creative team' stores and designers use them to help show off their stuff. By 'stuff' I mean kits: papers, word art, alphas, elements, brushes, actions, masks, templates....and so on- all the things I've been using these past few months to make these fun pages.

Owl Tree Studios a fun new store for digi-scrapping and crafts, will be opening soon and I've been selected as part of their Creative Team. I'm so excited and a bit overwhelmed with all the new things I have to learn that don't even relate to scrapping, not to mention the scrapping part! I can't wait and look forward to showing all of you what can be done with their kits.

SM template challenge

Well, this was one work intensive LO. I started just doing pics of little T, as I usually do, and found all these kiddies shots of when the neighborhood kids were babies, so I couldn't resist putting them in here. Well, that started a long trek through all my old albums to find ALL the kids. So, finally, here they are. :)

The idea was that these guy have all been pals since they were crawling around on our floors. I think Jack, the oldest is 7 now, he just went to - get this - Science camp! this Summer and learned game programming. Vivian - Jack's little sister was recently born and the youngest of the group. Even though most of the families have moved away, we love getting together and love the casual parties that get thrown together at the last minute.

When They Were Babies

Credits

TEMPLATE YB designs (ScrapMatters design team) AndiLynn

ELEMENTS Cassie Jones_30MM Freebies (Designer Digitals), Katie Pertiet: Button Mix (Designer Digitals), Chelle's Creations: Half Moon Bay (ScrapMatters), Angela Hartline: Click (Digital Design Studio), Michelle Martin: Ingrid (Designer Digitals)
PAPERS ConniePrince: looptyloo (ScrapMatters)
FONTS handwriting: Digs My Hart, Tag word art: Impact, Date word art: Century Gothic, Impact, Journaling: Walkaway, Century Gothic, Impact

Blog...

I'm feeling like I need to trick out my blog template. I'm posting this to see how long THAT takes me to do. lol

Unbreakable Friendships

I made this page for my "Mike" album. You know... the one I was making for Father's Day, LAST month? As I was writing the journaling part, I got a little sentimental about what a great guy he was and how he is so shy to make new friends but then I thought, the people that he really calls his friends, have that much more meaning to him than people who have dozens of casual aquaintances that they consider friends. See? That's why the journalling part is so hard. I get all introspective or lost in some other thoughts... funny how I write and talk a mile a minute regularly, but when its about making it into an album... I take forever! This is actually one of the few I journaled at all.

This page shows a few of Mike's closest friends. They are all over the map but all tied to his heart. I haven't shown this page to him, so I hope I can keep this one as a surprise. Maybe.

Credits
All items purchased at Scrap Matters
PAPERS HayNay Designs SMP, Man in the Moon Designs Wild Things (Rochelle Hall)
ELEMENTS Haynay Designs SMP - note: pawprints altered- separated, erased with PS brush
FONTS Base02, Hiccups

What??!? Get OUT - I Won a Lay Out of the Week??!?

Well, since my last post, I've been really amazed and humbled by the community of people who are on the digi-sites. I got 2 more layouts (LOs) submitted for Layout of the Day. Wow. Keep in mind, there are a few dozen layouts that people randomly find and post, but to have mine even viewed, I'm all a-giggle. (ok, don't throw up, I'm a little giddy cuz its all new... and cuz I'm me. lol) I have to admit, every time I see a comment to one of my LOs, I grin. And, stepping back a little, I never expected people to ever comment on my layouts, either, so that alone was fun for me.

What put a gigantic grin on my face was that, unknown to me, my very first challenge submission got selected by Gennifer Bursett of Design House Digital as their Layout of the Week! Wow. Every notice is a huge compliment but this one is particularly an honor because its the first 'real' thing I've done and the site gets hundreds of uploads every week - and someone who runs the site picked my page. Its so cool! And the cherry on top, is that I get a $5 GC to the store. (Of course that will mean, I spend another $20 cuz I'll see sooo much I like. lol)

Of course, I had to grab the page to show it off- because I AM that much of a goober.

and the lovely things she says about my page.

Note: the word art and the frames were part of the Deena Rutter's kit (Scarborough Fair Heirloom), not of my creation, so the compliment completely goes to her, but still.... I'm thrilled.

So, my new mission is to pay it forward. I've been scanning sites and commenting on pages I like but not as much as I should - mostly because I was shy and didn't know what I was doing, so after I finish my chores today I'm going to go spread the love. :)

Ad Challenge by Gotta Pixel

I am surfing around the sites (yes, procrastinating from completing the photo scrapbooking albums I started) and found these things Ad Challenges. A few sites have them where they find inspiration via print, posters, websites, online ads, etc.

Gotta Pixel (one of the sites that I've donated much of my 'play' money to on paydays) had this one:

What I loved about this Ad was the clean, white space, the similarity in not only the furniture but also of how they were shot. I didn't have any photos that I loved for this, but I really wanted to play with it, so ... here is my take:

Credits

Everything: SpinkyDinksScraps_FutureStar (Gotta Pixel)

LayOut of the Day

I found out that someone submitted my layout for the July 6 Layout of the Day on Gotta Pixel. Wow.

That is such an honor... to just join a site and post my first jpg and not only get viewed and commented on (which was so cool to begin with) but to also have someone like my page enough to submit it for layout of the day... wow. That is super cool.

I don't know if it comes through on my past blog posts (especially since they are mostly just pictures) but there is so much about scrapping that seems like a secret club with their own language and the people have been doing this for ages, they know the 'rules' and how to find things like hidden freebies and know when special sales are coming and all this 'in the know' kinda stuff. So its awesome that these people have taken note of my personal little pages.

Anyhow, this is the page that got submitted. I didn't win (which gives you a $5 gift card to the store) but as you can tell, I'm so thrilled anyway! (I cropped off the dozens of other submissions in between so I could show it with the site page header).

Smile

This was for a Gotta Pixel "All Stacked Up" Challenge (for July) hosted by Rachel of Captivated Visions.
I'm out of 'fun cash' this week, or else I would have bought a few of her papers and kits. Well, that's what a wishlist is for! :)

I've been toying with the idea of doing a few pages - or a theme album - of lyrics. So, that's what I started this page with, then realized that I'm so old and no one would know the lyrics I had in mind... so I went with an old quote. ha ha.

This page will go nicely into Mike's Father's Day album. (Correct, I haven't finished it, yet.)

On a side note, I submitted applications for a CT (which stand for Creative Team in Scrapping code). They give you the materials to work with and you create pages for them to show as examples of how to use their wares. There are all these rules, like you have to upload to certain places and create a certain number of pages, but there is a cool element to it, which is you interact with the other women who are part of these groups and get feedback and hints and its sort of a community. So, I'm putting a toe in the water there. I should find out by July 16th, I think.

Credits - everything is available at Gotta Pixel except for one paper (identified below):

PAPERS: B.Miller GP Welcome pack; Sweet Digi Scraps At Work, Little Engineer; Colies Corner Shy Guy; JBaechtold Little Dude (ComputerScrapbook.com)
ELEMENTS: Sweet Digi Scraps At Work, Little Engineer
ALPHA: Sweet Digi Scraps At Work
FONT: Baby Boston

Fourth of July 2010

As I was typing the journaling, I wanted to highlight some of the copy and chose the blue of Lindsey's stars. Then thought... why not make my journal copy a flag, too? I might still change some of the kerning, but I'm pretty happy about how the word flag turned out. :)

 PS - I LOVE the shots I got of the fireworks themselves. May have to make a page of just those. lol

TEMPLATE: Lindsay Jane Designs (Free Template - Gotta Pixel+Pickleberry Pop)

PAPER: Anna Aspnes, Tattered Paper (Designer Digitals)
TEXT LAYOUT: Scrapporreia


FONT: Digs My Hart

Boys of Summer - June 2010

This is a quickie page using a freebie template that I have no idea when I got. The point of this one was to play around with Word Art - and of course, use some photos from our recent vacation in Myrtle Beach.

TEMPLATE: Ana Cabrera (Craftification.com)

ELEMENTS (metal clip, ribbons, string, tag): Audrey Neal Organic (Design House Digitals)
PAPERS: Audrey Neal Organic

BACKGROUND: MaryAnn Wisen GrundgySolidPapers (Design House Digitals)
WORD ART: Scrapporreia
FONTS: Arial, Arial black