Project Life Week 24

Week 24 went together very quickly.  I find that using products from the same line means I spend less time trying to look for things that match.  About the most time consuming part is finding ink that matches or coordinates when I use stamps.  Plus, this week I added text to a photo before printing it for the first time.  I'll definitely be doin

g more of that. 

Missing My Friend

So today's Learn Something New Every Day post made think about things that used to be part of my daily life but aren't anymore.  The absolutely first thing that came to mind is my friendship with Val.  We used to talk nearly every day.  Now we're lucky if we talk four or five times a year.  She's busy with school, work, family, church and her other friends. I understand that, but it doesn't mean that it hurts any less that I feel like I don't have a place in her life anymore.  So today's journal entry was about losing that close friendship we used to have and I made a page to go with it. 

I pulled out a collection pack that I bought at the sidewalk sale at Craft Warehouse this summer.  It's Crate Paper's Paper Heart Collection.  It's a pretty lovey-dovey set that I actually bought to scrapbook some of our wedding pictures with, but there's a couple of papers in there that I just love that are a bit more neural, like this background page, which I absolutely adore.

I love, love, love the sayings in the Echo Park collections.  They always just seem to be perfect.  The only problem was that the color of this saying was all wrong for my layout.  So I printed the print and cut design out from my Silhouette Studio, scanned it and opened it in Photoshop.  I then filled the text with colors that went with my layout and cut it out again.  The only problem was the white cardstock I had printed it on was too white.  So I used a little Old Paper Distress Ink to age it a little.  Now it was the absolute perfect embellishment. 

I added some Recollections pearls that were part of my stocking stuffers this year (thanks Mom!), some Prima and Imaginesce flowers and Darice bling.  The little tickets are from a border strip in the Crate Paper collection and the heart is from my new stamp set from Inkadinkado called Hearts.  I finished it off with some Thickers letters (my new obsession) and some rub on letters I found in my stash.  The top flower has an extra little eyelet tucked behind the gem because it's the pull tab for my hidden journalling. 

I had today off and used the day to try the smoker out by myself for the first time to smoke a couple of piece of pork that we had left over from buying meat at Costco.  Pretty dismal failure although Hubby saved the day when he got home.  But my attempt at dinner was much better.  I found a lovely crock pot recipe for Cashew Chicken on Pinterest posted by Six Sisters' Stuff.  I changed it up a little by doubling the sauce.  Then just a little before we were ready to eat, I dumped in a bag of frozen stir-fry veggies.  It was wonderful, although next time I think I'll triple the sauce.

Then we finally sliced the apple pie we made yesterday after canning apple pie filling from the apples we picked in the afternoon.  Yum!

Boston Layout

This week's Sketch Inspiration sketch inspired me to scrapbook the pictures from my trip to Boston a couple of weeks ago and I knew I wanted to use the Brooklyn Flea kit from Studio Calico.  I had so many photos that I wanted to include that I decided the best thing to do was to create a collage of the photos in Photoshop.  After that, the rest of the layout went together very quickly even though I had to cut the bracket about four times in the Silhouette Design Studio before I was happy size.  I even hand wrote my notes for some of the pictures, which is rare for me since I hate my own handwriting.  But I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, except that it looks a little busy to me.  But, oh well, at least it's done.

Sympathy Card Using Cut Files Made For My Acrylic Stamps

A co-worker's father died this past week. While I have a stash of sympathy cards, I had bookmarked one on Michelle's I Stamped That blog a short while ago so I decided to scraplift it for a new card. I also used the card as an opportunity to try using my cricut to cut shapes to match my stamps. This is what I got:

While I'm not overly enamored with this card, I'm so excited about the flowers on it because I cut the shapes to outline a stamp set I own using my cricut (I only wish I was better at centering a stamp on a cut image). It was quite a challenge to come up with the cut pattern to match my stamps. If you try it, I would really recommend using a stamp with clean lines for your first try. The distressed stamp set I used was really challenging. After several attempts to figure out how to do it with this distressed flower stamp set, I finally found that scanning the carrier sheet for my pattern worked better than trying to stamp the image then scan it or trying to draw around the outline to make up for the distressed nature. Then I followed Creations with Christina's steps in Photoshop from this video, but found I had to do a little extra clean up due to the distressed nature of the stamps. But even then, the cutting lines were still a bit too jagged when I tried to import it into SCAL. So this evening I found that I could solve that problem by saving the Photoshop image as a bitmap then importing that into Inkscape. There I traced the bitmap to smooth the cutting lines as if I was trying to make a piecing file from an image. Once the bitmap was traced, then I could save the file and open the svg in SCAL. It took me several hours of trial and error, but eventually I had a SCAL file with cut files for all eleven flowers in my stamp set. Now that I've done what's likely to be the most challenging sets, I'm excited about the possibilities that this opens up.