Scraps Of Mind

Digital Scrapbooking Freebie

Here in Australia we celebrate Fathers Day in September. But I know that many Scraps of Mind readers are preparing to celebrate Fathers Day in their country next Sunday.

I had a look on Wikipedia and the commemoration of Fathers Day is scattered all through the calendar if you look around the World. It seems that there is hardly a month in the year when someone somewhere isn’t celebrating it.

So with that in mind I thought I’d give you some free word art to use in your Fathers Day card rather than just leaving the inside blank.

And if you won’t be able to see your Dad on Fathers Day, why not attach the word art to your Fathers Day email.

Anyhow here it is. If you right click on the image you can download a high resolution JPG file. This will have a white background.

But if you right click on the link below you’ll get a PNG file which will have all the transparent areas remaining transparent instead of turning them white. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you have any old family photos from the days before digital cameras (yeah, remember those days?)?

Maybe they’re really old photos from your granny or great-granny’s time and have suffered through the passage of time to look a bit battered and worn now.

How frustrating it is not to be able to create great scrapbooking memories from them just because the quality is so poor.

So I thought we might look at some ways in with you can use your computer and photo editing software to try and fix up these photos and give them a new lease of life.

Damage around the edge of your photos

Many of our really old photos have had a hard life. And it often shows in the dog-eared edges that they have developed over the years.

If the damage around the edges of your photos doesn’t extend too far into the photo, and if the background in this area is not important to the context of your photo, then the easiest way to deal with this is to crop the daggy edges off.

Now before we go any further I need to stress that you should not physically crop your old photos. It is the digital versions that I’m talking about. The digital image you have created after scanning your photo (using some of the tips in 6 Top Tips to Photo Restoration with Your Scanner).

The instructions in this article are based on Photoshop Elements but all good photo editing software programs will have similar tools and functions

• Load your scanned photo into your photo editing software
• Select the Crop Tool from your tool bar and drag the mouse across the part of the image that you want to retain in your restored photo.
• Release the mouse button and click on the accept check mark to crop your photo.

Dark and Gloomy

Often your old photos will actually grow darker with age as the black ink on your black and white prints starts to ‘take over’.

It’s important to try to fix as much of this as you can at the scanning stage as described in my earlier article on  using your scanner to help with photo restoration.

By adjusting the lighting with your scanner you can capture much more detail and you will be able to further improve on this using your photo editing software. If you don’t make this adjustment at the scanning stage then this detail will be lost and no matter what else you do, you won’t be able to get it back.

Once you’ve scanned in your photo, play around with the lighting, shadows and highlights functions and also with the brightness and contrast as I described in More Tips for Photo Restoration.

Here’s how to lighten up those dark and gloomy looking photos:

Read the rest of this entry »

Remember this classic photo of Marilyn Monroe standing over a hot air grating? I think everybody in the western world, no matter what their age, must have seen this.

Well is seems that a guy called Joshua Allen has taken this concept and turned it into some great street art.

I’m a big fan of good street art. I reckon we need all the help we can get to keep us cheerful as we go about our working lives in the middle of a large city. And livening up the streets with unexpected art has got to be a bonus for every day life.

Anyway, Joshua has created these very cool creatures out of plastic garbage bags and when they’re attached to hot air gratings the the effect is terrific.

Actually my favourite part is when the air turns off and they deflate.

So check out this and see what you think. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s another Scrapbook Freebie for you

Although you can use it for cards or anything else you want.

Last year I ran a fortnightly newsletter which many of you subscribed to. I gave away three original pieces of Word Art in each newsletter.

Well life is a tad more hectic this year and I don’t really have the time to put together a regular newsletter. But I still enjoy making Word Art.

So I thought I might offer some Word Art Freebies to you from time to time on Scraps of Mind.

Here’s the first. I hope you enjoy it.

Right mouse click on the Word Art and select Save Link As… or Save Target As… to downoad the full sized Word Art in PNG format.

I love this quotation, by my good friend Anonymous. Sometimes I think we need to be reminded that life is not just about the passing of time. We really do need to stop and smell the roses.

Anyhoo, I hope you enjoy the free Word Art. And if you have any favorite quotes or sayings that you’d like me to make into Word Art, just let me know in the comments below and I’ll see what I can do.

Other Related-ish Articles:

Scrapbook a Patchwork Quilt

Scrapbook Cards for Special Occasions

Scrapbooking with Lots of Photos

Facebook is really handy for tracking down long lost family and friends from your past.

And getting your name right probably seems so obvious that you might not think it worth writing about.

But here’s a tip I discovered a couple of weeks ago.

If your current name is different from the one you were known at school with (such as if you changed your last name when you married), then you should include your birth name in your profile name.

Darn!! I wish I had realised this when I signed up my Facebook account. Because although you can change just about anything else in your profile after your account is set up, you can’t change your name!

So annoying. I’ve had to open another account using my ‘old’ name to that anyone from my past, who might want to track me down, can search on my former name and find me.

What a der-brain I am for not realising this before.

But it is very cool to locate old family and friends with Facebook. I’ve found a couple of cousins from London and hopefully, with my new account in my old name, I might be able to locate some old school friends. How super-cool would that be? To locate an old school friend after many (many, many)decades?

Who knows, they may even be into scrapbooking.

Well wish me luck.

Other Related Articles:

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Scrapbooking Social Media Love-in

Who Wants to Increase Their Scrapbooking Profile?