Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Paper Accented Clothespin Magnets


I was browsing through some of my favorite blogs, and came across these cute clothes pin magnets over at Not So Idle Hands. Wouldn't these be cute holding up pictures or notes on the refrigerator?




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Saturday, January 21, 2012

Blurring A Photo Background

Here is a little idea/tutorial on blurring the background of your photo to make your subjects stand out.

I love this picture of my son and I, but unfortunately we have an extra "friend" in the background. In case you can't tell by the " "... we don't know this lovely lady!


Using a photo-editing software, I started by selecting my blur tool and set the strength level to 100%. Then, I just began going over her image over and over again, until she was as blurry as I wanted her to be.

Then, because it looked a little funny with her being the only blurry part of the picture. I went over the rest of the background a couple of times to blur it a little, but not a lot since I still wanted more of the background detail.


And there you go. Now, instead of the three of of standing out, it's just my son and I!

Monday, January 16, 2012

Free Ice Skate Paper-Piece Pattern



This one was inspired by my daughter who figure skates. Since we are at the ice rink 2-3 times per week, I tend to see a lot of figure skates on the ice and thought they would make a great embellishment!





*** All free patterns are provided for personal use only and copyrighted by A Scrap of Time! Do not recreate for commercial or resale purposes.


Parties I'm Linking To:

Sumo's Sweet Stuff

Monday, January 9, 2012

Adorable Snowman Candy Wrapper!

Isn't he cute??? I took my dog over to Doggy Dos by Terry the other day, and the girls were giving these out. I just have to say I love this dog groomer! They don't use kennels, so my boy is in heaven with all the attention and socialization he gets.

Anyways, it's a Hershey bar inside, wrapped in white paper with a fleece hat and little scarf. It's hard to tell by the picture, but the nose is actually a wooden piece glued on.

I loved it, and just had to share!






Wednesday, January 4, 2012

Design Inspiration

When looking for inspiration while designing your layouts, you don't have to look far. A lot of those busy paper patterns on the market actually serve as a great place to start with your design. I talked about busy patterns in my blog posts "How to Use Busy Patterns" (Feb 20, 2011) For example, I found this retro ornament paper that I really liked:


Looking at the background paper, I decided to use the ornaments as my basis for creating the main embellishments...



...and if you look really close, some of those ornaments on the background paper have little snowflakes, so I used those to find my secondary papers.



To frame everything up, I once again used a snowflake paper, but chose a sky-blue to compliment the browns with an extremely light pattern so that it does not take away from the background paper. Put everything together and here's final product.