We Will Remember Them

Tomorrow is Remembrance Sunday. It's an international day when we commemorate the war dead. I hope the layout above puts it succinctly.  It really isn't a difficult concept. I get that the US Veterans Day is slightly different and wouldn't expect American people to honour it any way except in their own way. However, there are (mostly) American digital scrapbooking stores who have international customers and international Facebook subscribers/fans. It really isn't a difficult concept to grasp that Facebook is international and a quick look at their paypal receipts will tell them where their customers are.

They just can't resist a marketing opportunity with money off and ridiculous games. One store last year offered 11% off 11 kits at 11 o'clock and other nonsense. It was as if she was trying to find 11 ways to offend people When you write to complain they will tell you they're celebrating a holiday and that everyone loves it. Really? Is this what the American people want? Sell, sell, sell at every opportunity with no respite to commemorate the dead? I can't believe that. Fight back. Write and tell them this is not acceptable. This is NOT some jolly holiday to turn  into a marketing opportunity. They should be ashamed.Very ashamed.

My grandfather did not spend four days trapped in a flooded trench with the dead bodies of his friends so that someone can make a quick buck. I can't tell you how disgusting that is to me as I don't have the words. It makes me feel physically sick.

I wrote to a few stores last year but this year I have more clout. I run the Digi Scrapping Freebies group and have banned any links that go to the"holiday" offers. No posts will be made at all tomorrow. It's already lost me some friends but so be it. I'll be unsubscribing from their newsletters and Facebook pages and those designers don't get to post on my FB groups either. we all have to do what we can to stop this vile practice. Clearly only money talks. So withdraw your spending!

Artist credits:

Remembrance Sunday: The kit is Natali Designs' In My Garden and the photo is Tyne Cot Cemetery in Ypres, Belgium]

Joe Hills: Quickpage from Belle de Nuit by Laitha's Deigns and Valentina Creations. Poppies from Natali's kit above.

Here's my grandfather:

Getting The Most Out Of iDSD

The hoodley what now? You'd have to be VERY new to digital scrapbooking not to know that iDSD is International Digital Scrapbooking Day. The first confusing thing about it is it seems to be more than a day. It's more of a 4 day thing from 1 - 4 November as different stores start at different times but TODAY is the big day.

There are a gazillion freebies and special offers BUT, make no mistake, this is a MARKETING event run by the digi stores and their aim is to sell you as much as possible. Your aim is to get as much free stuff as possible whilst getting some good deals on kits you've been lusting after.

First of all, DON'T PANIC. Brits -  feel free to shout that several times in a Corporal Jones voice.

FREEBIES

We have that covered. Join the Digi Scrapping Freebies group on Facebook and you'll find links to all the cool stuff and a list of blog trains and Facebook hops (in the File section). It's useful to know the links are there so you haven't got to rush round frantically finding and saving them. Of course, if you do find one we haven't got please post it!

The most important tip about Freebies is don't download stuff just you don't want or need just because it's free. There lies madness.

There are more detailed tips on how to save time, work efficiently and get a ton of stuff on our main site HERE.

BLOG/FACEBOOK HOPS

We have thirteen of these - at the last count - on Digi Scrapping Freebies so you don't have to go chasing around the web.  Yikes! Thirteen!! The article on the link above has lots of tips on blog hops.

Start with the My Memories one because you add the freebies to your account and can download them later which saves you a ton of stress. You don't need to have My Memories software to use the freebies. Just download the "general" files. as everyone knows, though. I use My Memories all the time and have made thousands - really - layouts easily. Go HERE for a good deal on MyMemories and access to our private tutorial group.


GOOD DEALS (???)

I regard at least 40% off as a good deal and tend to ignore the rest BUT lots of stores do deals at other times of the year so don't stress over it. Just make you sure really need (OK, want ...) the kits before exercising credit card.

There will be coupons - Some will come in the kits you download and some will come in emails. Save them in separate folders for later.

CHECK YOUR STASH

Designers tend to move about a lot from store to store or one store takes over another one. When the designer is new to the store their kits will be in the new products section. This is fair enough but they might not be new to you. It's really annoying to buy something you already have! That is definitely not a good deal. I file all my kits twice on two separate external hard drives - once under themes and once under designer names. There will be more tips on this in an article shortly. However you do it try to make sure you haven't already got the kit. If it looks familiar to your there might be a reason for that!

UNZIP AND TIDY UP

If you download stuff all day then you're faced with a mammoth unzipping task guess what will happen? You'll get fed up and delete the lot. That's what I did one year when I got to August and realised I hadn't unzipped stuff from the May NSD. As you're unzipping, if you don't like it or you're not going to use then delete it! There is no point in clogging up your computer.

TAKE A BREAK

Sick of people trying to part you and your cash? Take a break in the Digi Scrapping Tips group on Facebook. It's a completely advertising-free zone where you can show your layouts, get help, join in challenges etc. We have a weekly challenge every Monday and a daily word challenge. Plus chat of course. And absolutely no ads!

Eva Kipler

Eva was one of the first designers I ever came across when I first started in digital scrapbooking. She was immensely talented and I must have about sixty of her kits. I was so sad to learn she'd passed away suddenly on 30 October. I learned this just after I learned another friend had gone to prison. Some days you just wish the internet never existed and Tim Berners-Lee had invented a new vacuum cleaner.

Here are just a few pages made with Eva's kits. We have an album on Digi Scrapping Tips here if you'd like to add to it.

Finally, a tablet thingy....

We are well behind with technology in our house. I have one of those phones that's attached to the wall and my mobile phone is a...well, it's a telephone. That's all it is. I rarely leave the house anyway and when I do I want to get away from the internet, thank you very much. I even have one of those old lady phones with the big buttons!

 Since we were a bit worried about being left behind we bought a Kindlefire. That was our excuse anyway. It's hours of amusement with the added joy of not owning any i-junk. If you fill it with high res photos you'll soon fill it up and adding high res photos to it is pointless anyway. The screen resolution is 1280 x 800 and I found that about a third of my scrapbook pages ( so that's at least 700 pages) looked pretty good cut down to that size. There's an article on Coastal Scrapbooks telling you how to do it. You also get to see a slideshow of my cut-downs!

 Kindlefire tip: You can hook the Kindlefire straight up to your computer and transfer photos over. However, if you do that they will all end up in one album and that's not very convenient. If you add them to your Amazon Cloud instead you can put them into albums. They won't take up much room since you already shrunk them. Then access your cloud the Kindlefire and download each album. You can access them on the cloud any time but it's nice to have some photos for when you have no Wifi (like at my Mum's house!)

Welcome to our new blog

Thus blog is "attached" to the Digi Scrapping Tips group on Facebook.

New Tutorial for MyMemories Fans

Here's a question for you. No, I don't need you to find Wally. I already live with him ... Is this layout

1) Two circles surrounded by odd shapes? Or ...

2) Rectangles with circles in front of them?




If you believe in 2) then you can make this layout! The tutorial is on Coastal Scrapbooks HERE and there's an album set up on Digi Scrapping Tips for your layouts. There's no excuse. It's easy! There aren't many things you CAN'T do in My Memories Suite! Come and challenge us!

Ths layout is from Lindsay Jane's Simple Set 6 Bonus (currently free on her blog). Word art is from StoryRock's Destinations and other elements from SAS Designs' Flying the Flag. Photos? Me, John and our friends Lionel and Barbara during Oriana's sailaway from Madeira in December 2009.

Prettying Up The Tower of London

The Tower of London was not a fun place. The website portrays it to be a fun place NOW, of course, but you wouldn't want to be there a few hundreds years ago unless you were prepared to come out without your head. My husband, John, works in his firm's London office occasionally and he took this photo in May on a wet, grey day. Not that our summer days have been much different since...



It would make an interesting old v.new study but I decided to use a mask to remove almost everything except the Tower. I also used the Auto Enhance in Paint Shop Pro X4 to brighten it up and change it to how it looks on a sunnier day. We've given up all hope of a summer here in the UK and have to do what we can to pretend! Generally I've found PSP X4 auto enhance to be completely useless - my old PSP 8, Paint Shop Album and virtually any other program you can think of is better. However, while the photo is on the screen waiting for its mask you might as well hit the button and try it and this time I got lucky.

I used Wendy Tunison's World Traveler London Add-on kit and a free border cluster made by Simply Creative by Thao. I covered up a few bits like suitcases with a few extra embellies mainly from the New York kit. I don't know why designers think London is full of Victorian objects! It's very difficult to find British kits that aren't extremely annoying to any British person I might show the layout too. Even DH remarked that it must be obvious it's London in this page. I just liked the postmark effect.

Don't like Mondays? Try our challenge!

Every Monday on the new Digi Scrapping Tips group on Facebook we'll have a Monday challenge. You don't HAVE to make a page on Monday but it could improve your Mondays if you do! It's not a speed scrap and there are no strict rules. You'll just get a design idea or sometimes an easy tutorial and you can interpret it how you like - and add as many pages as you like. We're putting them in an album each week so they don't get lost down the busy page.

Today's challenge is to use three photos in a row but make one of them a bit different. That's it. Easy! Here's one example. I used Lindsay Jane's Sea Breeze template for MyMemories, tilted the middle photo so the name of the ship was straight then put the frame BEHIND it.



I have a few more examples for you here: Slideshow ~ Gallery. Have fun!

New Facebook Group - Digi Scrapping Tips

I hope the noticeboard says it all. Someone is obviously ignoring the request to keep it tidy! I used Heather Roselli's Cubicle with a View to make it.

The new Digi Scrapping Tips group is a completely ad-free zone with pretty strict posting rules to make it a nice place to be. There is far too much "Look at my new kit" garbage on too many Facebook groups and pages. We're quite capable of spending our money without any help! There are several tutorials on there and there will be even more soon. We don't mind which  program you use for your scrapbooking. Whatever it is I bet we can teach you new tricks with it.

We even have a plan to make Monday something to look forward to. Hey, we have a noticeboard for that too!

The Digi Scrapping Freebies group we started a few months ago has a fancy new header, a daily photo challenge - see post below for yesterday's and you can now post good deals you find in the Files section. So I think we got it all covered!

Many thanks to my team of "admin" for both groups - Kimmie, Catherine, Diana, Yobeth, Rachel and Debbie - smart, tough cookies!

A Chair With History

Today I wanted to make a layout with a chair. Like you do. This Lloyd Loom chair was the first thing my parents bought, along with a matching linen basket, for their new home when they got married in 1949. I say new home but in those days that consisted of what my Mum called "Furnished Rooms" so I suppose it was nice to have something that was actually theirs.

As you can see Mum and Dad thought it was hilarious to have a photo of me sitting in the chair holding a bottle of gin. I suspect that was Uncle Ernie's doing and he would have been the one with a camera.

When we got married Mum and Dad gave us the Lloyd Loom set and we painted it dark green (it was Olive green before) to go in our bathroom. The linen basket has remained green - and we actulaly use it as a linen basket - and the chair has been painted blue. This might  be its last incarnation as it's a pain to paint!

So why on earth am I making a layout about a chair? Well, apart from wanting to share the thrilling story, today Photo word of the day on the Digi Scrapping Freebies group is "chair".The challenge is fun to do and you can use pages you've already made. There's nothing worse than having to make a page each day when you don't have time. So it's not a P365 thing. I can't abide those. But that's the subject for another long rant another time.

This layout was made with Lindsay Jane's Essence of Blue MMS template.

My Lovely Molly

My beautiful bunny Molly left us for the Rainbow Bridge on Tuesday. It was a traumatic day and I'll write about it on the bunny blog soon. I don't feel I can do it just yet but I can't get on with things on this blog and not show you a page for Molly so here it is. I used Indigo designs' Spring Mask Memories Mask MMS Template.

Two birthdays, just like the Queen ...

My Mum was 85 last week. The Queen gave us an extra day's holiday to celebrate. well, some say the day off was for the Jubilee but Mum knows it was for her birthday;-) She got a card from Lilibet to prove it!

We didn't make it for her birthday so she had a second party with even more jubilee decorations (she already had plenty ...)

The frame and embellies are from Snappy-Scrappy. I put a plain shape between the frame and the photo to mask the corner. It's coloured to match the background - one of those optical illusion tricks. I even recycled this layout into a page for the Street Party scrapbook which I'll show you soon.

How cool is this?

I had an "Aha" moment and imported the old Arcadian Scrapbooks blog posts into this one. So there's a whole load of junk you can read... it does at least mean I can have old MMS advice posts on here much quicker than I can write them for the new website.

I do rather like the new Blogger interface even though it's a question of hitting buttons at random until you find out how to do stuff. btw if you want to import or export a blog it's all under Settings - Other.

Sleep is for wimps

I thought I'd beaten the only-stressed-peeps-get-this virus but it turns out the cough comes back as soon as you lie down which rather puts paid to sleeping. The new website has got to the stage of needing brain power. Putting links and pictures on it is a bit like putting together an MFI wardrobe, for those old enough to remember. You really don't want bits left over. Fortunately, Weebly is a joy to work with and a lot less clumsy than it used to be - and infinitely better than the waste of cyber space who used to have my scrapping website.

So with brain addled from lack of sleep I made the new header for the blog. Working out how and where to change the background and load an image took up a lot of brain power. I was very fast on the old system!

It would be much much better if I could just make a long thin scrapbook layout but the designer TOUs are a minefield. I don't mind at all paying for a commercial/professional license for a kit if I can actually use it for the site and blog BUT CUs are designed primarily for designers making kits for others. I'm not interested in that and wouldn't have the skills anyway. Some refer to a "personal website". CS might not be regarded as purely personal. That leaves us with "professional" licences which specifically allow business marketing. They're expensive and I've only seem them one site and haven't seen any suitable kits yet. The last option would be to pay a designer to make a header for me. That would no doubt be expensive and since I'm about to give up my income ...Right now I can't be bothered to get into licence shenanigans so we have to stick with what I can make with photos.

I can't give you a link yet as new blogs get removed if they have too many links and not enough content in the first few weeks but , let's see, you might just be able to work out the site name from this blog and take a peek. There are lots and lots of albums, naturally. It's always good to have more eyes on the layouts! Tutorial-wise the list going on there gets longer and longer. I started backwards a few weeks ago and made some tutorial slideshows (the easiest way to do it) so my friends could do some of the more geeky things. All those will be there but I'm going to try and get on with the Newbie tutorials so new scrapbooking friends can get started quickly. We're getting there!

Out with the old and back in with the old again

Welcome to my new blog. I'm typing this for purely selfish reasons as I need to know how the text looks. There will be lots of playing with the design. It might even have some content soon. But then it's gardening season. This blog title basically says everything about how I waste time - scroll down and there's a beach. There's a ridiculous font, there are/will be scrapbooks. If only it had a cat and a bunny... I'm not too sure about the mauve colour but then I'm even less sure of my skills in manipulating this new fangled blogger system. I just hope it allows HTML or there will be no slideshows. Oh, right. There's a big button there that says HTML ...

EDIT: Since writing this I discovered how to import the old Arcadian Scrapbooks into this one so now it's a new blog with about 65 posts!