More Textures, and Some Stitching!

Happy Thursday everybody! Hope you had a wonderful iNSD weekend--I sure did, scrapped my fingers off! And I also cranked out some more textures, this time patterns, and another, lighter, paper texture pack. The latter are just perfect for adding a touch of 3-dimensionality to a patterned paper, did you know? These textures say they're for Commercial Use, but I really mean it's Commercial Use OK (including designing materials, or scrap-for-others/hire)--because they're wonderful for personal use of course. They also look really good over photographs! And, some stitches, just 'cuz... =)

And here are some very fun uses of the stitches:

By Petra:

By Lisa:

By Romy:

And by Jen:

Good layouts for noticing the textures, too!

I hope you have a lovely end of the week... =)

New Stuff, New, New, New!

Oh my gosh, I don't even know where to start. Well, for one thing, I'm opening a new section of my store: Commercial Use items! These can all be used for Personal Use of course, but it's also for designers, photographers, or other artists wishing to expand their toolbox a bit. The first three items I have for that are collections of texture: Fabrics, Paper, and Complex.

Also, I have a Free-With-Purchase deal going on: buy more than $4.00 (anything in my shop!), and get this set of stitching for FREE (don't forget to add it to your cart, and it will zero out at check-out time):

And to top it all off, I have a gorgeous set of 7 templates (perfect for the Project 365/52/12 you have going on) from the "A Year of Hope" collection coming out, in the clean and simple style (which makes scrapping go really, really fast!):

And the CT have made some lovely pages:

By Romy:

By Lisa:

By Jen:

So, hope you all have a great weekend--and tomorrow, look for the MScraps train blog!! We have a ton of challenges planned for Fri/Sat, too--it's going to be so much fun!

A Little Lost For Words...

The earthquake in Japan, and the subsequent tsunami, have left me in a very strange space. We don't have TV at home, so I haven't been inundated with footage there, but I have been compulsively following the news on the net. We of course, being on the Oregon Coast, had our own tsunami fears, evacuation panic, and creeping guilt at having been left ok. I remain extremely concerned about radiation from the failing reactors in Japan as well. I cannot fathom the state of shock in which Japan and its people must must find themselves.

I did have two items come out in the shop on Thursday; I've just been too preoccupied to mention them. So briefly, here they are:

Stitchery 1:

And I'd Love To, repackaged from TDC:

My crew, and the MScraps CT, have made some real beauties with combinations of the two:

By Ulla-May:

By Lisa:

By Karen:

By Vera:

 By France:

By Romy:

By Sonia:

Please take time to spread some love around you this weekend... =)

Extractions

No, not teeth. Though that may yet come.

For this one I used a dark brown linen bookbinder's thread stitched loosely into some light, white-coated chipboard with a large embroidering needle, then scanned it at 600 dpi. Because of all the little "hairs" coming off the thread, I decided to use the Extraction filter (up in the top portion under Filters).

This filter is pretty tricky, and I find it useful only in some very specific cases, such as when you have fine lines that are burned through with background color, which makes extraction with a selection marquee (either with a pen or the lasso) pretty useless, and very frustrating in its fiddly-ness. The Extraction Filter works by painting over the edges of what you want to retain, then filling the inside. You can even set the opacity in terms of what is retained, and that's where it comes in handy... For this one I used a 1 pixel brush to go over the contour of the thread and the "hairs"! On the image below you'll see the original scan, and the extracted thread used on my "Tangle" layout, which follows:




(click for credits and description)