Good morning!

It’s Trish here with this week’s Product Spotlight, Rummage Chic! If you love vintage, patterns, and flowers you will love this kit. This kit is perfect for any season girl pages. The soft colors aren’t so pastel that they make you think spring, and they aren’t so subdued they make you think FALL. They just make me think girl. Plus, and this is a big plus to me, there’s not really any pink! I love girl kits that aren’t all pink. That probably comes from spending 2 years scrapping almost only boy pages, lol! And what is not to love about the alpha in this kit? It’s on a plain cream backing but has the most gorgeous detailed glitter lining the letters on the inside.

Rummage Chic will be on SALE in the Shoppe this week for only $5.21 – that’s a 25% saving!! :o)

Here’s one of my pages made with this stunning kit:

And here is some more fabulous inspiration from the Shabby Artists:

If you’re interested check out this beautiful piece-a-cake album made with Rummage Chic.

See you all back here at the Shabby Shoppe Blog for tomorrow’s update!

TrishProduct Spotlight, Uncategorized 5 Comments

Hey, everyone! Happy Monday, Lu here! Hope ya’ll had a wonderful weekend… I’m back today to do LOTW, which is always so much fun for me.  Tough choices, but still… I love it! I’ll tell you what else I love, as I have a hard time resisting this little guy & his mama’s awesome layouts, lol! Congrats to be2be (Winston, too, of course) and their best buds layout:

 I’ve been following Winston since he first appeared in the gallery in early September. He seems like such a rascal & is a bit irresistible, I think! Oh my… the pics of this little dude just cracks me up! Now, how cute is he snuggling up to Richie Rich? But this guy has some antics, and I’m hoping to see more “In the Life of Winston” in the gallery! Once I get past the pics, I love to study the “just so” touches of be2be. For this layout, I love how the colors from the Richie Rich doll are echoed by the colors & elements of the Festival kit, (available as a free download at the Shabby Princess site). I love the clean simplicity and use of negative space. That is a technique that I’ve rarely attempted, much less mastered, lol! So I always appreciate it when I see it. What works so wonderfully here are the colorful buttons that reinforce the multi-color polka dot paper, the accent paisley paper joined directly to that adorable photo, as well as the pins to secure it.  I struggle with “keeping things simple” (just ask my husband), but love the impact that it makes. In their own unique way, be2be’s layout’s stand out & speak volumes… just check out her gallery to see what I mean. Congrats again, be2be! Can’t wait to see what Winston has been up to, lol!

Thanks to everyone posting all the fantastic layouts in the gallery this week, we love perusing every day to be inspired & see what is new! Have a wonderful Monday…  and check back in with us for tomorrow’s Product Spotlight. Happy Scrappin’!

LuLayout of the Week, Uncategorized 8 Comments

Happy Friday, everyone! It’s Lu today & I’m bringing you another sweet & spicy recipe! I am definitely in the mood for fall now… and that has me craving comfort foods! I have such a sweet tooth, and even though I don’t care for pumpkin pie, I  found a wonderful recipe for Pumpkin Ginger Cupcakes on allrecipes.com…. and WOW! These little gems are tasty! They are delicious by themselves, but when you dollop them with cream cheese frosting… all I can say is, you better make two batches because they go quick. Here’s what you’ll need:

Pumpkin Ginger Cupcake Ingredients:

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 1 (3.4 oz) instant butterscotch pudding mix
• 2 teaspoons baking soda
• 1/4 teaspoon salt
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/2 teaspoon ground allspice
• 1/4 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1/3 cup finely chopped crystallized ginger

 and…

• 1 cup butter, room temperature
• 1 cup white sugar
• 1 cup packed brown sugar
• 4 eggs, room temperature
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
• 1 (15 oz) can pumpkin puree

Cupcake Directions:

• Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
• Grease 24 muffin cups or line with paper liners.  In  a medium bowl, whisk together the first (9) ingredients.
• Beat together the butter and both sugars, until light & fluffy.
• Add in the eggs, one at a time, until each egg is blended. With the last egg, beat in the vanilla & pumpkin puree.
• Stir in the flour mixture, until just incorporated. Pour batter into prepared muffin cups.
• Bake for approximately 20-25 minures, or until tops are golden & spring back when lightly pressed.
• Cool in pan for 10 minutes before transferring to wire rack to cool completely.

Now,  you can either stop here & start enjoying or… you can proceed to the next step, the cream cheese icing! While the muffins are cooling down, now is the time to whip up the cream cheese frosting (also from allrecipes.com). If you plan to have the cream cheese icing with the cupcakes, it’s a good idea to go ahead & put out the cream cheese blocks & butter along with the cupcake ingredients, to come to room temperature at the same time.

Cream Cheese Frosting Ingredients:

• 2 (8 oz)  packages of cream cheese, softened
• 1/2 cup butter, softened
• 2 cups sifted confectioners’ sugar
• 1 teaspoon vanilla extract

Frosting Directions:

In a medium bowl, beat together the cream cheese & butter, until creamy.
Mix in the vanilla, then gradually add in the confectioners’ sugar.
Store in refrigerator after use.

As fall is something worth celebrating around here, I sent these cupcakes to work with my husband to share.  He said everyone in the office just raved about them (then he asked me where I bought them, lol).  Just like with my chai tea post, I thought this was a great opportunity to show off the Fall Festival Confection Collection! The cupcake wrappers (shown in my photo at the top of this post) are the perfect attire for these sweet treats!

 These cupcakes are perfect for school bake sales, Harvest dinners (they’re already on my menu for this year) or even a weekend breakfast/brunch. I love to bake up muffins for the girls… However they are served, they’re sure to please!  I’ve created recipe cards for both the cupcake & the frosting. I used the AUTUMN MEDLEY kit in the design – and don’t forget, it is on SALE this week only as the Shoppe’s product spotlight!  Just click on the image to download (or click HERE)… and enjoy!

Just a note:   the allrecipes.com logo is being used with permission…actually – it is a requirement in their licensing that we include it on the recipe cards as well as here on the post.  Just wanted to let you know in the event you were wondering why there is a logo on one of the cards :o)

We’ll see you back on Monday with our LOTW… Have a wonderfully “sweet” weekend!

LuFood Stuff, Free (not desktops), Uncategorized 5 Comments

It’s funny how things can work together to inspire us.  A mishmash of things all came together for the idea for today’s inspiration.  First,  my sweet hubby and just I celebrated our 31st wedding anniversary.  (Wow! That sounds like such a long time! lol.)  And, I started following a thread on a parenting board where members were posting their wedding photos.  I enjoyed so much looking through the images, old and new, of couples on their first day as husband and wife, all with faces full of hope and love.  Mostly, though, life has been totally crazy for us lately, and it’s made me appreciate my sweet hubby all the more… so, I just had to tell him so.  (Don’t you love it when you feel a good journaling coming on!)  So, here’s a little tribute to marriage and what a wonderful gift it can be as the Shabby Artists and I share our wedding photos with you. 

by Karen

by Kylie

by Lu

by Mariquita

by Anna

 And now, it’s your turn!  Make a page with an image from your wedding and share it with us in the gallery. I can’t wait to see your smiling faces! :)

Join us tomorrow as Lu shares a sweet treat with us!

KarenInspiration, Uncategorized 9 Comments

Morning all! Trish here today to bring you my trick to keeping those blue skies blue in your photos after editing.

Now, I do a lot of editing to my photos… I do mean a lot. lol I like my photos to match what I want to work with (as demonstrated here). But even when I’m not playing with the colors of my photos or doing something drastic to them sometimes after doing basic editing my skies are no longer blue. This happens a lot to my summer outdoor pictures, because I don’t know about where you live, but here in the southern United States our clear summer skies are generally a more washed out super-pale blue to begin with.

Here’s an example from yesterday (no it’s not summer anymore, but again southern US – it’s just now thinking of becoming fall lol). This is the original SOOC (straight out of camera) picture: 

 And here it is after just some of the most basic editing I do (which I don’t plan to leave it at for my page anyway).  Already I’m starting to lose my blue skies.

 After my next set of edits (which I did with actions by the talented Sarah Cornish of My Four Hens) my sky is even less blue. For the most part this is the effect I want the picture to have for my layout, but while I like the vintage look I’d prefer my sky to be more bluish than it currently is. 

 So, I’ve seen lots of tutorials on fixing skies in photos, but truthfully, they either confuse me or as soon as I learn them I forget how on earth I did all the steps, or how to do the steps. Even going back and re-reading them I’d get confused, so I figured out an easier way to do it. Here’s what we’ll do:

Open both your edit and your original photo in one work area. Duplicate the edit and order your layers like this Edit>Original>Edit like so:

 Now take a soft eraser brush and go over the sky in the top Edit layer being careful to only get the sky.

 Now that is much too blue for the rest of the picture. It might seem quicker to adjust the opacity of the eraser instead of going through these next steps, but by just using the eraser at the opacity of 100%, it gives you more room to adjust and play with the blue level without having to keep repeatedly erasing the sky.

What you will do is select the Original layer and you can lower the opacity on that to however much you want to get that shade of blue that you really want. I lowered mine to 25% so that it’s blue, but not too blue.

Now to finish it all I’ll scrap my page! I used primarily French Countryside though there are touches of a few other kits.

Well, I hope y’all enjoyed that and find the post helpful! Don’t miss tomorrow’s post with a little romantic inspiration!

TrishTips and Tricks, Uncategorized 4 Comments