2008 April | Scraps Of Mind

Archive for April, 2008

Posted by karooch on

April 14, 2008

The Story of Aviana

Welcome to Scraps of Mind. I'm delighted to see you. Why not check out the site, you'll find a bunch of great scrapbooking and blogging articles, tips and tutorials on the Articles Page. And if you enjoy this or any other articles on Scraps of Mind, I'd really appreciate you giving them a thumbs up on StumbleUpon to share them with other Scrapbookers. Thanks for visiting and I look forward to seeing more of you.

Today I’d like to share the Story of ten year old Aviana with you.

Together with a few of her friends, Aviana decided to shave their heads to raise funds to aid the Uganda Project which is funded through The Global Heart.The aim is to build schools in Africa.

Although her mother was nervous about how this would go, she agreed to support Aviana and they shaved her head.

Aviana then rang her friends to tell them that she had done her bit, only to find out that none of her friends had gone through with it.

She was devastated!

Her mother writes:

It was shaky there for a few hours. Afterwards she cried as she was the only one. She called herself ‘ugly’ and cried, sad and angry. She wanted her hair back. I looked over at her hair (all of it) lying lifeless on the table and exclaimed, “Oh, I get it…you think it’s your hair that makes you beautiful…how about you run off then so I can spend some time alone with your hair.”Well, something shifted in her and about 30 minutes later, my daughter was dancing and singing out loud about how beautiful she is. Do you know what else she is? Brave. Courageous. Caring. Daring. And her own person. Being the only girl who shaved her head, she is getting lots of positive feedback. And I think she gets that she is not her hair.

Watch this video interview with this gutsy little girl and help her in her goal to build a school in Uganda.

You can read the full story here.

Saturday Scrapbooking Ideas

Saturday Scrapbooking Ideas #8

Many commercial birthday and Christmas cards that you receive from your friends and family will have very cool and pretty elements as part of their design. Things like embossed stars and flowers etc.

Try collecting these and cutting them out. You can then adhere them to a piece of cardstock and and cut around the outline, leaving about a quarter of an inch of card showing. Then use them as embellishments on your scrapbook layouts or hand made cards.

A great, no-cost scrapbook accent!

Top 10 Scrapbook Ideas to rekindle your Inspiration

Posted by karooch on

April 11, 2008

Five Freebies on Friday - 11 April 2008

Time to go and forage through another great collection of Five Freebies on Friday. Check out these great Scrapbooking Freebies.

And please don’t forget to leave some love when you download your freebie. Just a simple thank you comment makes all the difference to the designer who will have put a lot of time and effort into creating your freebie.

There’s a scrumptious kit over at Scrap Kitten that you’ll really love.
Foxy Designs has a very tasty freebie add on mini kit to her Scarlet Wine kit.
Click over to KristinCB Designs for a truly gorgeous quickpage.
Bonnie is still giving away freebies at Scrappin til the Cows Come Home. I particularly like her vintage look stuff.
And here’s a cute font at Show and Tell Scrapbooking that’s specifically designed for scrapbooking.

Ript - A Virtual Noticeboard

Thatch sent me a link to this knacky little web application called Ript.

The application creates a virtual noticeboard on your computer where you can grab pictures and snippets from the web and store them until you need them.

I’ve used it here to make a collage of some of the layouts I’ve published on Scraps of Mind together with snippets of text from some articles. And I grabbed them all from the site itself; not from the files on my computer.

I reckonthis would make a really cool scrapbook idea as it would be really handy to grab bits of information or layouts that you might want to scraplift at a later date and keep them all together in a handy and easy to see place.

And the two most important things to note:

It’s EASY and it’s FREE!

You just download the free application from the Ript site and install it.

Then it will put a little icon like a pile of papers on your desktop which sits in front of whatever window you have open. When you’re surfing the Internet, if you see some info that you want to keep, just highlight it and drag it onto the Ript Pile. If you see a scrapbook layout that you might want to use for future inspiration, just drag it onto the Ript Pile.

Then you can go to your ‘noticeboard’ and organise your snippets as you like. You can save your page as a jpeg to send to friends or as a Ript file so you can add to it later.

Ript call this a scrapbook page but I don’t think it’s the way we think of scrapbook pages. In my opinion, the real value of this little application is as a virtual noticeboard for storing all those bits an pieces of info that you pick up on blogs but then can’t remember where you saw them. You know the stuff.

Anyway why not check it out for yourself. It’s uber easy and quite a fun thing to do as well.

Try Some Repetition in your Scrapbook Layouts

When it comes to scrapbook layout design it’s a good thing to repeat yourself.

I know that sometimes you have so much you want to put on your scrapbook layout or maybe lots of photos that you want to try and incorporate in that oh so small 12×12 space. And you may not want to repeat elements when there are so many more vying for a place on the page. But there is a lot of visual power in repetition.

The eye jumps around all over the place when it’s trying to take in lots of information. That’s why we use techniques like Z-movement and the Visual Triangle to help guide it through a scrapbook layout design. And whilst the eye is jumping around your layout it’s not really focusing on your key point. This is usually the photo or it may be a particular theme or shape which your design has been built around.

Repeating this element in your layout will create more of a visual impact on the viewer’s eye and will help them to absorb the visual message you are sending them. It makes sense if you think about it. And as a scrapbook idea, I really like it.

In my Rialto Bridge scrapbook layout I’ve repeated the photo in the background to ensure the viewer’s eye is drawn to the bridge. And credits go to Valerie Randall of Scrap Girls for her wonderful Altered State kit. I just love the papers in that kit.

Repetition of scrapbook layout elements also has the effect of adding structure to your scrapbook layout design and make it easier to ‘pull’ the overall page together.

So why not try some repetition on your scrapbook layouts?

Ah said, Ah said, Why not try some repetition on your scrapbook layouts?

Sorry… I just had a bit of a Foghorn Leghorn moment.

How to Make Frames with PaintShop Pro

Joe (aka Wildheart) from Wildheart’s Works returns to bring us another great Guest Post. This Guest Writer Series is a great opportunity for Scraps of Mind readers to see some of the great ideas and talent of other Scrapbookers and also an opportunity for other Scrapbooking Writers to showcase their work to other Scrapbookers.Enjoy Joe’s great PaintShop Pro tutorial and then click over and check out her blog.

A couple of years ago when I was heavy into finding everything I could on Paint Shop Pro I came across this great site called Nanson’s Place. This site is how I learned to make picture frames for paint shop pro. You can go to the site to see the great stuff they have over there. I had to go back in to get a refresher this evening as I sat down to make this frame to show Scraps of Mind readers how to make interesting, one of a kind frames expressly for your own creative ventures.

First let me show you a frame I did for you to get an idea of what can be done.

You can save this to your hard drive if you wish so that you can add it to your own frames file in paint shop pro.

To get this you need to do the following:

1. Open a new image 400 x 350 for best results and select transparent.

2. Flood fill with your color, gradient or pattern of choice.

3. To give it some texture you can go to Adjust>Add Remove Noise> and play around with the settings. You can also go to Effects>Texture Effects and then play around with the blur, density, length, and transparency to get the desired effect you want.

4. Now go to Effects>Kaleidoscope set your horizontal and vertical offset to 0, Rotation to 0, and the scale factor can be adjusted to your liking, petals to 4, orbits to 0 and radial suction to 0. Select edge mode>Repeat

5. Effects>Image>Offset check center and wrap, also leave the numbers at 200 and 175.

6. Select your magic wand tool and set your tolerance to 5.

7. Click on the center of your image, then Selections>Invert. Go to 3D effects>Inner Bevel and play around with the settings until you find a look you like. Go to Selections>Invert and then hit the delete key on your keyboard to get the frame. Then Select>None

8. To save this as a frame go into File>Export>Picture frame and give your frame a name and click save.

9. To save to your hard drive go to File>;Export>JPEG Optimize, compression to 1, save with the same name you gave the frame in your frames file.

I know this sounds pretty tedious, but trust me it is a great way to make your own frames and also it is really a fun exercise to do to keep those creative juices flowing when you get stuck in a rut. You can visit my blog to see the other two frames I made

Be sure and check out Nanson’s Place though there are so many interesting gradient tricks to learn and try.

Joe (Wildheart) is a Graphic Designer from Kansas who writes the Wildheart Works blog, where you can get lots of inspiration and more great textures.

The Scrapbooker’s Bill of Rights

I found this great Declaration put out by Hot Off the Press and I just had to share it with you.

The scroll looks great but it’s ~~hard~~ impossible to read so here’s what it says:

The Scrapbooker’s Bill of Rights

A Scrapbooker is entrusted with documenting and safely preserving family photos in an album to be treasured by future generations. Creating a Scrapbook is an honorable and important task. As a Scrapbooker you are entitled (but not limited) to the following rights:

You have the right to take as long as you want to complete one album page. This may be five minutes or two weeks.
You have the right to purchase a certain scrapbook item for no other reason than because: