Morning all!! Trish here to bring you a short and sweet post for our LOTW!

As always, all of y’alls pages are just wonderful, and I had so much fun looking through them all. We have some majorly talented ladies posting in the gallery, and it was so hard to choose just one page to feature. However, as I was looking through all of this week’s pages added, I saw this one and oh my word, it is just stunning!

This week’s LOTW spot goes to aconover‘s “Everything You Need to Know About Being Left-Handed“. A major selling point for me on her layout is that large picture with a not-so-common focus. (Which is something I love on pages. lol) Then the simpleness of it, with not just the journaling, but also her explanation in the photo details.

From the photo details (because in my opinion this adds to the overall page):
“In watching my friend struggle with her left-handed 4 year old, I thought it might be fun to share some helpful hints with my daughter on how to survive in a right-handed world.”
Isn’t that such a sweet and touching sentiment to add? What a special mom she must be!

Congrats aconover! You have been emailed a $10 gift card to the Shabby Shoppe! And the rest of you talented scrappers, keep adding your pages to the gallery; and who knows, maybe yours will be the next one featured.

We’ll be back here on Wednesday with a post that is sure to inspire! Happy Scrapping!

TrishLayout of the Week, Uncategorized 11 Comments

Hi all, Trish here to bring you the first of our 2 part springy product spotlights!! This month we are highlighting SP’s lovely spring kits, and I’m kicking it off with BLOSSOM (on SALE for only $5.95 for a limited time)!

BLOSSOM is a wonderful spring kit that has a stunning combination of bright and pastel tones. It’s full of fun doodle elements and wordart, flowers, shabby accents, and some beautiful papers. This kit is fastly becoming one of my favorites. Which is pretty evident since I’ve used it on four pages… not counting the two I did for the spotlight! lol

Here’s one of my pages using BLOSSOM:

And here are some more beautiful layouts by the Shabby Artists showcasing the kit:

By me and Anna. Yes, my Belly is wearing the same outfit in both of my layouts…what can I say it’s an adorable outfit! And look how grown up and beautiful Anna’s little princess looks! I love the way Anna rocked those swirls on her page and how the butterflies just follow along them is wonderful.

Next up are two pages by the very talented Kylie. I love how she created two completely different looks using the same kit. Plus those cupcakes looks so scrumptiously delicious, and my word, how precious is the pouty face in that first layout!!

Look at the two beautiful pages created by Mariquita. How fun and adorable these pages are! Love them!! Her girls are so precious in their little swimsuits, and what a cute idea making them a magazine cover on that first layout.

And to wrap things up, a fun layout by SP!

BLOSSOM is just a kit not to be missed so make sure you pick it up while it’s on SALE, and make sure you check out these pages in their larger sizes in the Shabby Artist Gallery! Maybe you already have Blossom, or love it but don’t have time to create a bunch? Then you should check out the 12×12 and Badge Piece-a-Cake albums available in the Shoppe. Also, spring is a great time to update the look of your blog, and we have that covered with Blossom also. There are two different sets of BLOGwear available with Blossom (for personal blogs only), you can find them here and here.

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  Join us back here on Thursday, when SP shares a NEW template challenge (number 11).

TrishProduct Spotlight, Uncategorized 7 Comments

Hi, Trish here with another Tips and Tricks post! We’ve had quite a few questions on the blog about turning straight stitches into circular stitches, and I’ve been working on one way to do this so I could help y’all out. I think, after much work and frustration in Photoshop I’ve figured out a way to do it. Now, to get them perfectly round takes a lot of nitpicking with the steps, but I think the imperfect look fits SP’s products so much better.

So, first things first, open your stitches and place them on your page. The stitches need to be lying vertically, if you try to do this with them horizontal it won’t work. Don’t ask me why, I don’t know, I just know it doesn’t work. Lol!

Once you get them vertical, go to Filter>Distort>Shear and a box will pop up that looks like this:

Go to the center of the line in the box and click it and drag it all the way to the side of the box.

Next, go about halfway up and down from the mid-point and click and pull those spots until you get a rough semi-circle. It won’t be perfect, we’ll work on that after we do the Shearing steps.

You should now have something that looks about like this:

Now go to Edit>Transform>Warp. Click the tiny squares on the top and bottom of the open side and drag them down (top box) and up (bottom box)…until you get it closer to a semi-circle.

Take your stitch and duplicate it, then flip it horizontally so that your duplicate is the mirror opposite of the other, and then move them so that the edges are touching.

And there you go! You can do the Shear steps in PSE, but as of PSE 7, you cannot do Warp, (newer ones – maybe, I don’t know) but you should still be able to tweak it some to make it work by using distort and such. You can also apply this to ribbons and ric rac, but the wider the object is – the more you can see the distortion it causes - so I really don’t recommend doing a full circle with them. If you use CS and this is something you can regularly see yourself doing, I advise just making an action out of the steps to save yourself time later.

And here is my final page using the BLOSSOM collection!

If you have your own way of turning a straight stitch into a cirlce, we’d love for you to share your technique with us in the comments section!  Thanks and be sure to return on Friday as SP will have a fabulous Food Friday post for us! Yummy! :o)

TrishTips and Tricks, Uncategorized 20 Comments

Hi all! TRISH here to bring you our newest Tips and Tricks post about selective editing!!

Now, I won’t lie, this was a tough one to bring you because a.) This is one of my biggest secrets to my photo editing and b.) While it’s not hard at all to do, it was pretty tough to try to explain, lol. I’ve been bugging a few of my friends for a few weeks now getting them to help me fine-tune this by making sure things were understandable. So I really hope this works. :o) Also, though I hate to admit it, I have yet to find a way to do this in PSE. The whole trick is based around being able to use layer masks, which as far as I know, PSE does not support. One last thing (then I promise to start explaining things, lol) all edits are done by going to Layers>New Adjustment Layer – this is necessary to do the selective editing.

What, I’m sure you’re asking, is selective editing?? Selective editing is where you apply edits to just parts of your photo, not the entire photo. This is really helpful when you have just bits and pieces of your photo that need a little extra correction. Say the color on most of your photo is correct, but the skin is still wrong. Or say you have (as my example does) a high contrast photo and you want to edit it without blowing out other parts of the photos. I use this in editing about 99% of my photos in one way or another, even when it’s not to do something dramatic, but just a sort of fine tuning.

NOW… onto the tutorial!!
Here is my straight out of camera photo:

Color-wise, I really just want to edit the red tone on the legs, all of the other colors are about 100% accurate already, but the red in the wood floor and curtain give her legs a red cast. While doing the edit, I am not going to worry about what the edit does to anything except the legs. It can make the rest as funky as be but I don’t care.  After doing my edit, I’m going to set my foreground color to black.

Go over to your layers, select the color balance edit layer, and click ONE time on the white box. Select your paint fill tool, go to your picture and click it like you want to fill it black. Your edit should no longer be visible, BUT your picture should not be all black either. If it is, undo, go back to your layer palate and click the white box ONE time again, then go back to your picture and click it as if you were filling the layer black. The white box in your layers should now be black.

Go to your brushes and select a soft brush and then set your foreground color as white. Again go to layers and click the black box. I’m going to go back to my picture and brush over all the skin in my picture. The color balance that we did should now show up only where we go over with the brush.

Next, I want to darken the shadows and slightly increase the brightness of the light spots, but I don’t want to overdo it so that I lose detail in certain spots. I do, however, want to get rid of the detail in the background. I’m going to do this by first adjusting the lighting curves. Once I get those how I want them, I’m going to select the white box on the curves level, then set my foreground color to black and select a soft brush. Last time we painted white onto the black box to make the edit come back. This time by painting the black onto the white we remove parts of the edit. First, I’m going to erase it over the window to bring back some of the detail. Next, I’m going to paint over the curtain and the toy. The curtain, because I still want to be able to have the slight see-thoroughness of it, and the toy so that it brings back the detail to it. Lastly, I’m going to paint over some of the shadow on her leg and shirt, again to bring back details. 

Lastly, I’m going to edit the contrast of the photo. I still want the background darker and I want to try to lower the amount of glare from the window. After I do it the way I want it, I’m going to use a black brush to brush out bits of it again. I’m going to go over all of the same spots I did last time.

That’s it! Really, it’s not that hard to do. I promise, lol. And here is a comparison of the photo if I had left the full layer edits that I did, and then my final version using just selective editing:

Tomorrow, SP will be here to bring you the latest Template Challenge – we are already up to number TEN…can you believe it! :o)

TrishTips and Tricks, Uncategorized 8 Comments

Good morning! Trish here to bring you the latest product spotlight, Sweetie Pie.

I am of the opinion that anything that uses the word “Pie” as part of a name, is awesome, but then I do call my daughter Pudding Pie, lol! Now, like my daughter, Sweetie Pie is filled with some awesome, cute, super adorableness with piles of hugs and kisses on top. That’s what makes Sweetie Pie the perfect kit to spotlight before Valentine’s Day.

Super cute filled adorableness, right? And for the next two weeks this kit is on SALE for only $5.95 (that’s a sweet 25% off!) at the Shabby Shoppe.

To show off the scrumptiousness some more, check out these sugary love-filled pages created by some of the our Shabby Artists.

Thanks for stopping by today! Be sure to check back tomorrow for a post by SP…and on Friday for some sweet little hybrid ideas by Kylie.

TrishProduct Spotlight, Uncategorized 2 Comments