April 2011 - My Crafting Den

Lovely Bea Purple Photobook Template

April 28, 2011 By PurpleKiss 2 Comments

When it comes to gift giving, I like making it personalized. Stuff that I’m sure the person would appreciate. I like giving giving gift baskets with flowers or gourmet foods like those in www.cherrymoonfarms.com/gift-baskets-cgb. I also like handcrafting {if I had the time} gifts. Sometimes, I order personalized gifts specially if I have sometime to prepare and the occasion is really special.

One of my favorite gifts to give close family and friends are Photobooks. Collages of memories, college snapshots I’ve collected, family outings, I compiled in photobooks..It’s personal and a labor of love, so to speak..Making one takes sometime though and can be exhausting. The easy way would be to use templates so you just need to add photos and voila! you have a personalized photobook.

I have made a lot of photobook templates and here’s one from my Dare to Be Vivid kit called Lovely Bea. It’s available in 6×6 Lovely Bea – 20 Pages, 8×8 Lovely Bea – 20 Pages, and 12×12 Lovely Bea – 20 Pages.

Here’s the preview. It’ll only work if you have Microsoft Silverlight installed. Otherwise, please click on the links above to view the photobook template.

Filed Under: Artscow, Digital Scrapbooking, Personalized Goodies Templates

Preppy Choco Free Artscow Kit

April 28, 2011 By PurpleKiss 1 Comment

Here’s my second kit for Artscow called Preppy Choco. My daughter and I had been snacking on some Kit-Kats and I suddenly wanted to create a kit with a brown-chocolate-ty look. I actually made the whole kit in just one day. And when I was done I had dark circles under my eye. I guess I was on my OC overdrive again. I think I’ll be needing dermitage soon if I keep obsessing like this and eating lots of chocolate.

Anyway, back to the kit. I find it cute and warm. Colors are brown, very pale yellow, cream..It’s also my first time making a kit with Alpha cum Tags. I still find a lot of things I needed to improve on specially shadowing but I’m glad a few people found the kit nice enough to use. To date it has been used 630+ times. Yay!

I also made a couple of templates for photobooks, cosmetic bags, keychains etc from the kit and I’ll be featuring that soon here.

Filed Under: Artscow, Digital Scrapbooking

Kit Making for Artscow…

April 28, 2011 By PurpleKiss Leave a Comment

It’s been awhile since I made a kit for Artscow. I know I’ve been swamped with work and well, I’m living a life hahaha! {really!} so this has taken a back seat. Not that the interest is waning. Far from that, and besides Artcow was the one who prompted me to explore digital scrapbooking as a hobby so I’m not gonna abandon it. So far, I’ve made five free kits for them {check them out here – purplekiss}, you can easily use them to design your personalized goodies.

All of my kits in Artscow are free. How do I get rewarded with the time and effort I put in making these kits? The tricks and tips I learn as I make the kits are by far the best reward I get. I’m just a newbie at this and everytime I try making something I learn a little, and for me that is something that cannot be equated with money. And while the kit may be for free, I also put together personalized templates from my kits and everytime someone uses the templates I earn a commission. Not much but I’m quite happy that I get a little compensation.

A friend asked me, I have tons of online work, writing, blog maintenance, web design and developing new blogs, so why do I still bother doing these? I have an easy answer to this. Scrapping and graphic design, I really don’t consider as work, its a hobby. It relaxes me and I’m happy doing it. Which makes me wonder why {back when I was in college} in the world did I think that I would be happy having management jobs when at the back of my mind I knew I wanted to do something technical as well as creative? But thankfully, I discovered this passion, albeit later.

I have a few Artscow kit concepts in mind, I just need to find the time to make it. Hopefully soon. In the meantime, I’ll be blogging more about my other kits as well as the templates I made.

Filed Under: Digital Scrapbooking, Just Me Blurbing

PS Freebie: 10 Lovely Roses Photoshop Brushes

April 26, 2011 By PurpleKiss Leave a Comment

Been tinkering with Photoshop and made a couple of Photoshop brushes. Raw photo files from the coolly awesome free photo archive Photo Rack. I picked out some of the loveliest single rose blooms and made them into Photoshop brushes. You can easily recolor or overlay colors with these brushes. The key to finding good combinations is –to try it out!

~ Download ~

Enjoy!

Oh, how to load the brushes on Photoshop? Just go click on brushes icon and click on the little triangle arrow for the flyout menu and click on load brushes. Select your brush and load it.

Filed Under: Free Photoshop Brushes, Freebies, Scrapbooking Freebies

Featured Design Resource: Pattern Cooler

April 21, 2011 By PurpleKiss 1 Comment

Creating seamless patterns can be easily done if you know your way around a graphic design software like Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. But this can be time consuming, and frankly though I can create patterns from scratch, I’d much rather not coz we’ve already established that I’m a lazy dweeb and also there are various resources online you can use for your pattern needs.

And here’s one of my most favorites – Pattern Cooler. And its FREE. Yes, its FREE. There are ready made patterns you can choose from and download directly or you can also use their very cool Pattern Editor to tweak the color combinations of patterns. And the patterns you can come up with is virtually unlimited.

They have thousands of base patterns you can tweak. Also one thing about this is that you can resize your patterns!! That is a huge relief for me coz sometimes patterns look good when they are small while others work best when they are supersized.

Their terms of use are pretty flexible. You can use the patterns for personal or commercial work. But I think, really its a must to give out something to the people behind this cool tool. I have yet to use this for commercial work but for now since I get so much fun tweaking patterns there, they are deserving of this post.

Check them out if you need seamless patterns for your graphic design projects or even for your Twitter backgrounds.

Filed Under: Scrapbooking resources, Software~Web Talk

Something New To Explore: Web Themes

April 19, 2011 By PurpleKiss Leave a Comment

I could never stop myself from dipping my fingers into a lot of things. I blog, I do a bit of web designing for friends and now I’m crazy about scrap booking, {not to mention crocheting, cooking, reading and a whole slew of hobbies}. For me, designing a web page becomes a whole lot easier if you know your way around image editing and graphic designing. You actually don’t even have to know 100% about coding to come up with a design for a website.

For one, there are a lot of WYSIWIG web site editors available now. I started that way, and while I do know a little bit about HTML and CSS, I hardly find it a pressure to come up with a theme with that little knowledge. What you don’t know, you can easily google, there are lots of tutorials out there or you can seek others help in forums.

Coming up with a generic looking theme is actually easy. I love using NVU and recently Artisteer to make templates. But the only complaint I have with these stuff is that in awhile you’ll be churning out templates that looks commonplace. But NOT if you make your own graphics. Those little color tweaks, image snippets you add on your web site gives it a whole customized look.

So I asked myself, why not combine these two things I so love doing? Tweaking stuff in Photoshop/Illustrator/Inkscape and make some templates for web sites? So then, I have a new project at hand. I’ll be posting previews of my free theme releases here. Downloads will be directed to another domain {which I have yet to buy.. I can’t think of a good name yet}.

Wish me lots of luck!

Filed Under: Just Me Blurbing

Scrapping Freebie: 3 Vintage Polaroid Frames CU

April 19, 2011 By PurpleKiss Leave a Comment

If you think I’m over vintage stuff already, think again. I think its my life long obsession! Hahaha.. Anyways, I love polaroid frames but I don’t like the sterile black and white look so whatelse could I do with it but age it, make it old and vintage! Here’s 3 polaroid frames that looks so old and fabulous.

Enjoy! This is CU ok. Please read my TOU included on the zip file.