But I also wanted to make sure that it was really helpful in some way when it comes to actually telling your story, otherwise it’s just another pack of word art. So instead of the boring old sample text that I stick into most templates, this sample text in these files include ideas and tips to jumpstart your journaling. So whether you’re a seasoned storyteller or just starting to dabble in journaling, they’ll make the process a little easier for you. Consider them story starters, just add you!

These little gems are a little bit word art, a little bit template, and a BIG help when it comes to telling your story. Since it’s Back-to-School time for my little one, that’s where I started! I’m sure a lot of us have a stack of photos we took this year on the first day and we need to get them into the album. Each layered file contains handwritten word art and a customized text path to wrap around it, plus journaling tips to start you on your way.

In addition I wrote out 20 words to accompany this back-to-school theme – pictured below.

There is also a Professional Use version of this product HERE.

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through Friday, September 10th.

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Have a great week! シ

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Instinct @ 9th & Bloom

by Bianka:

by Christine:

by Claire:

by Crystal:

by Dana:

by Jeannie:

by Jenni:

by Julie:

by Kelly S:

by Leslie:

by Lex:

by Michelle:

by Renee:

by Som:

by Steffi:

by Tali:

The great news about September, though, is that I’m a guest designer over at 9th & Bloom this month! If you haven’t been over there yet you really need to check it out. Holly Griego opened the doors to 9th & Bloom at the beginning of August and it’s positively brimming with great designers, challenges and outgoing community members.

For my debut I created Instinct, and I love the Autumn palette. I’m a huge proponent of following your gut, and I’ve become something of an (annoying) evangelist about it. I’m resistant to change, I fear the unknown and I have quite a bit of self-doubt – but sometimes my heart is just pulling me distinctly in one direction and I really try not to let all of those negative things get in my way. The saying “fate loves the fearless” is one of my new favorite mantras – and it’s included within, of course!

Instinct is 20% off for the first 48 hours, no coupons necessary!

(Doesn’t the dark packaging just blow your mind? Haha. It really threw me for a loop.)

Giveaway Winner!

Congratulations Corinna! I’ll be sending you an email with instructions for claiming your prize!

I’ll be back tomorrow with inspiration from The Flock! Enjoy your day!

Once again, you have the chance to win it by leaving a comment here. See the details below!

Layout by Steffi:

Instinct Giveaway

To enter for your chance to win this digital kit, simply leave a comment below by Tuesday,  August 31st at 12:00 (Noon) EST. You can improve your odds of winning by posting about this giveaway on Twitter, Facebook or your blog – or all three. Just make sure you come back here and post links in the comments section (please post as a new comment each time) so every entry counts towards your chance to win.

To make things a little more fun I decided to add more winners every time the comment count rolls over into the next set of hundreds. So at 101-200 comments, 2 winners will be chosen. Comments 201-300 will guarantee three winners, etc. So spreading the word increases everyone’s odds.

I will announce the winner when I announce which store I will be a guest at , along with the release of Instinct.

(comments are now closed, check back tomorrow to see if you’ve won!)

Out of the masses of food photography that Christine featured, a single trend started to reappear that came to be known – in our house – as “The Todd Shot”.

We. Love. The Todd Shot.

Many people try to capture the essence of The Todd Shot, but few succeed.

Todd goes for it 100%. Mouth wide open, hunger crazed eyes – it’s a tough shot to pull off. It’s about 10% love of food, 90% complete lack of self-consciousness.

See what I mean? I wasn’t “all in”. I started laughing so I couldn’t pull off the crazy eyes, I was self-conscious about the Internet seeing my dental work. Todd Shot FAIL.

I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I didn’t DESERVE to.

Later that same trip, Todd had to right my enormous WRONG by attempting the Never Before Seen High Risk Of Being Bludgeoned By A Life-Size Vegetable (or Fruit?) Todd Shot – which will forever go down in history as one of the funniest moments of my life. Watching him stalk this giant tomato in order to achieve the shot was one of the highlights of my life.

The other day when I was working from home I sat down to eat lunch with Nicholas. I made “seven ingredient sandwiches” because Nicholas likes to have a name for his food and I’m really creative like that, can’t you tell? He and I don’t get many chances to sit down and have an actual homemade lunch together. When he’s out of school we pick up a lot of food on the go (bad mom!) and on the weekends our eating schedule is all over the place. While we ate we had a chance to talk about what he was looking forward to this coming school year and his favorite highlights of this past summer – and because I appreciated the moment so much I ran into One Little Bird World Headquarters (a.k.a. my new office) and grabbed my trusty Nikon.

And Internet, I am here to inform you that out of the ASHES OF MY SHAME has risen a phoenix. Granted, it’s just a little baby phoenix – but I have hope. Because completely unprompted, and despite the fact that he has never read the Listgirl Blog (sorry Christine!), he struck this pose:

We still need to work on the crazy eyes, but I figure a few days of starvation will cure that. You have to SUFFER for ART, child!

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by Claire:

by Jeannie:

by Jenni:

by Julie:

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by Leslie:

by Lex:

by Renee:

by Sarah:

by Som:

by Steffi:

by Tali:

Want the Alpha for Free?

Subscribers to my newsletter, The Cage Liner, receive an exclusive discount on Enlightened
PLUS they receive the Delightful Alpha for free with their purchase.

Current subscribers, make sure you check your email to retrieve your coupon code.
Not a subscriber? Subscribe now and save!

Giveaway Winner!

Congratulations, Rebecca! I’ll be emailing you with details on how to claim your prize!

I’ll be back tomorrow with inspiration from The Flock! Enjoy your day!

It’s the inspiration behind my upcoming kit – those people who bring us happiness, a sense of calm purpose. The sort of people you need only think of and a smile appears on your face. If you’re lucky, as I am, you have many of them in your life. They come in all shapes and sizes, of many different ages, but they make the day-to-day a little more bearable.

Layout by KellyS:

Enlightened Giveaway

To enter for your chance to win this digital kit, simply leave a comment below by Sunday,  August 22nd at 11:59 PM (EST). You can improve your odds of winning by posting about this giveaway on Twitter, Facebook or your blog – or all three. Just make sure you come back here and post links in the comments section (please post as a new comment each time) so every entry counts towards your chances to win.

I will announce the winner when I announce the release of Enlightened on my blog on August 23rd.

Subscribe & Save

Remember that subscribers to my newsletter, The Cage Liner, receive an exclusive discount on new releases. So make sure you subscribe and save!

Good luck everyone!

We do have a sunroom in this house, though. It’s sort of an ugly little thing, formerly a 3 season porch that the previous owner had enclosed. It has giant windows on three walls, its own heat and ceiling fan – up until now we’ve been using it as a “mudroom” I guess you could call it. It’s off our kitchen so it’s the dumping grounds for coats, shoes, backpacks and other assorted nonsense. It dawned on me last week that the sunroom could be the answer to my office problems. It’s just a short trip through the kitchen to get to me. The reason I’d never considered it was because we never put blinds up on the windows. We weren’t really using the room for much, it’s off the back of our house, so we never felt the need. We do have neighbors on two sides, though – so on Friday I hung more linear feet of wood blinds than I care to think about.

I also have a 180 degree view of the backyard, separate heat for the winter – and also, the most important thing, a TON of outlets. I don’t know what she had planned for this room when she had it all enclosed, but there are outlets everywhere. The room itself is only about 6′ x 10′ but it has 6 outlets in it and it’s on a separate breaker from the rest of the house.

I set up an old desk out here over the weekend and took the set-up for a test drive – and wouldn’t you know that I managed to get a ton of work done? I haven’t known productivity like this for quite some time. Tom has been telling me for years that if I just sat at a desk I’d be far more focused. I don’t have attention deficit disorder or anything, I’m just really easily amused by ridiculous things. There’s no doctor that can cure that disease, folks.

Oh, another fun perk of the sunroom office? Setting up a sprinkler on a hot Saturday afternoon and being able to watch my crazy 9 year old run through it like he was a toddler again. All while getting a few papers made for an upcoming kit.

So now that I’ve decided that I adore this space, we’re going to take a trip up to ye ol’ IKEA to pick up a larger desk for the long haul. (And if we’re FORCED to have lunch at Chipotle, then so be it.) After many years of happy laptopping, I’ll be gradually making the shift over to a desktop computer again. My laptop has been giving me subtle hints that its “get up and go” has “got up and went”, so I’ll be relieving it of a lot of its duties so it can just be a carefree laptop once again – unencumbered by the monstrosities that are Photoshop and Illustrator.

I’ll still need to paint this ugly little room – but thankfully it’s mostly windows and not a lot of wall space. Hopefully I’ll be able to share a little before and after shot sometime next month – as long as I don’t get distracted by something shiny.

You know who loves this room just the way it is, though?

This little guy right here.

In my soul I’m a very carefree spirit and adore when pages have a windswept, unstructured look. It seems as though it would be effortless enough to achieve, and perhaps it is for some people, but when I sit down to create it the obsessive compulsive inside me screams “nooooo, things must be lined up!! LINE IT UP!!” If I’m being completely honest, I consider it “wild and crazy” when I take a composition and rotate it about 5 degrees. Hold me back! What’s next? Dancing on bars?!

In paper scrapping if I wanted to create a random scatter of items I’d probably just take a handful of stuff and throw it at my page, then glue things down wherever they landed. Photoshop could seriously benefit from a “Throw Crap At The Page” Tool. Can you imagine? In my mind’s eye I can picture it. I’d be able to select a couple of items via a file browser, set up a few parameters, and then click a “Throw This Crap At The Page!” button.

Maybe in CS6?

For now, in order to create seemingly effortless scatters I was left with no other option but to devise a completely regimented way to achieve a totally non-regimented look. It forces my inner obsessive compulsive to swallow a few mood tranquilizers and allows my free-spirited hippie soul to dance around with glee.

Note: You can click on any of the screenshots below to open up a larger version.

Step 1: Select a basic round brush and increase the size to about the dimensions of the items you’ll be scattering on your page. I’m going to be scattering little paper flowers, so I chose 250px.

Step 2: Create a new layer on your document for your brushwork, and now we’ll tweak the brush settings in the Brush Palette. You can access your Brush Palette by clicking on the bucket full of brushes over by your layer palette (if enabled), via the toolbar at Window < Brushes or by pressing F5. Copy the following settings as your brush specs:

Set brush Spacing to 300% for our purposes, you can fiddle with this number to make your scatter more dense or sparse.

Shape Dynamics Settings: Move the Size Jitter if you're going to want to have "bits" of different sizes throughout your scatter. If you want all your elements to stay the same size, leave this at 0%, if you want a lot of variation then move it up higher. The Minimum Diameter setting just sets how low it'll go, I have my Size Jitter set at 60% because I want a lot of variation, however I don't want any teeny tiny elements so I bumped the Minimum Size up to 15% to keep them from getting too small.

The Scattering tab controls the settings for how far your circles will stray from where your mouse is. It's what puts the "random" in this whole system. Make sure the "Both Axes" box is checked (so that it will scatter both above and below the path of your mouse, and also to the left and right) and then tinker with the slider - trial and error - until you get where you want to be. The higher the number, the less Photoshop will follow the actual path of your mouse. If you choose a lower number your "bits" will stick closer to your mouse. Think of it like having an untrained dog on a leash - the longer the leash, the further they'll stray.

Step 3: Now you can sample a brush stroke on your page. Try clicking and dragging your mouse across the page in a straight line from left to right and see where your dots fall. No two scatters are ever alike, so sometimes I will Undo (CTRL+Z) a few times and try again until I get a scatter that I like.

Step 4: Now I’m ready to drag my elements onto the spaces I’ve mapped out with my scatter brush. Just open and drag them on like you normally would, resizing them to the approximate dimensions of the circles in your Scatter Brush (and rotating them slightly as you go, if you’d like).

Step 5: All that’s left to do is delete (or hide) the layer that has your brush stroke on it, and shadow your elements. (For tips on creating realistic drop shadows, you can visit my Drop Shadows: The Basics post.)

So there you have it! A way to overcome your obsessive compulsive tendencies and create a windswept look on your page. You could adjust the sliders in your brush palette to create an infinite number of scatter variables. I didn’t touch on it here, but if you use a square brush (instead of a round one) you can also mess with the Angle Jitter in the Shape Dynamics tab to distribute your elements at pre-defined angles. You can also create multi layered scatters by distributing one element, using your scatter brush again, then scattering a different element.

It’s no “Throw Crap At A Page” but it’s pretty close!

Now here’s the part where I shamelessly promote myself:

Paper and flowers are from Abide by One Little Bird (that’s me!)

You can visit my Mind-Blowing Drop Shadow Tutorial for my tips and tricks on shadowing in Photoshop.

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