Congratulations to Rebekah our winner this week! I’ll send you an email with the coupon code!

Anne, you will be contacted by Molly or I with a coupon code for this fantastic set of album templates, journal spots, and papers!

Special thanks to Biograffiti for the fabulous prize! Please check out all of Molly’s templates and kits!

For those that didn’t win this time, be sure and follow my Facebook page to try again next time! And, check out the featured designers because several have offered some exclusive, limited time coupons!

Check out what I’ve done with the templates for non-baby pages and then go register to win! I’m accepting entries until midnight Friday night and will announce the winner Saturday morning!

Credits–Templates by Biograffiti other items:

• clouds and spider web-MK Designs
• plaid paper, tree-Kitty Chen
• birthday things-Julie Bullock
• pumpkin and owl-Laura Deacetis

I love these photos of my girls on an early spring day. This was the first time Raeleigh rode in the Jeep. Danielle was finally getting good enough at driving that we let her take Raeleigh for a ride. Although I think Danielle just knew how to drive in circles!

Anyway, this template was created especially for my Facebook Fans! You can get it by clicking on “Fan Offer” in the left column of the page. You can even use the frame over again on other layouts! I hope some of you will link up your layouts using the template or the frame!

I also created a Quick Page for those of you that want to use the Template as-is….you’ll just need to drop in your photos behind the Quick Page. And of course delete the parts of photos that overlap another frame.

Credits: Flower; heart and leaves: Hawksmount brushes; Distressed edge: Amanda Rockwell; Paper texture: Miss Tina; Dots background: Just Jamie; Frame template: Luiza Garay; Shadows: One Little Bird; Swirls: obsidian dawn; Painted edge of frame:atomic cupcake; Styles: Miss Vivi

I love these photos with the valentines. Danielle has a pink wig and is in front of pink azaleas, oh so perfect for valentines! She thought her teacher would like the photo choice. And, Raeleigh is laying in some ground cover with a dandelion necklace, which kind of went with the jungle theme!

I could have done these with unaltered photos, but I decided I kind of liked applying the sketchy affect to the photos. This time I did it with Photoshop’s “photocopy” layer. I did one layer above the photo as a photocopy layer, then I duplicated that and made the next layer sepia tone. The black and white photocopy layer is set at the “overlay” blending mode and the sepia layer is set at “color burn.”

As you can see the main difference with the Mobile Monet HD effect using my ipad is that the photo itself looks less watercolor-like here. See posts from last week to decide which approach you like better. I think they each have a place in the digi-scrap toolset.

Tomorrow the girls are going to attach their little valentines to some fruit roll-ups!

Credits: A collaboration kit at Scrap Orchard by Lindsay Riches and Laura Banasiak.

Can I just say again I love using templates. Templates in digi-scrap land are oh so much more of a time saver than “sketches” in paper-scrap land! Using this template my layout was started in a matter of about two minutes! It is nice to eliminate some decision making to speed things along.

And working with kits eliminates more decision paralysis, because you know everything goes together. The papers, word art, frame, and splatters are from an Oscraps collab that you can get on sale right now for only about $5. It has 55 papers and 91 elements, that is quite a deal!

The rest of the elements, flowers, heart and grass are all from a kit by Kitty Designs called “Thy Nature.” It happens to be on sale right now for only $1!

I couldn’t be happier with the way this little layout turned out. My daughter was being a ham, she loves it when I do her hair in springy ringlets! As you can tell the photos were taken in early spring and I think the layout really evokes the mood of Spring Fever!

I used a mask by Natali Design with fantastic snow flakes around the edges to extract the photos of my girls and place them into the snow scene. The only real trick was painting black into the mask to make sure their precious little faces stayed intact! For those who are new to clipping masks…essentially you place them on the layer immediately under your photograph and then clip it to your photo. Black areas in the mask show the adjacent area of your photo, the rest magically disappears.

The first layout below uses another template from Scraping with Liz’s Recyclables II set. And the second is a Biograffiti “Gridlocked” template. I was happy to find this kit by Tracey Monette and Gina Miller at 9th and Bloom. I loved the bright colors and thought it tied in well with the hodge-podge of mis-matched snow clothes my girls are wearing! Plus I love the felt designs!

You can’t go wrong with picking up some blocked photo templates, they let you pack a lot of photos in and finish scrapping an event in a snap. I really like pairing an artsy layout of my favorite photos with an opposite page like this. In fact, I have quite a few layouts that I’ve done for various CT’s that I plan to go back and finish out the event  with a blocked photo template. I blogged about using Quick pages this way, and gave several examples of how to do it at the Simple Scrapper blog last summer.

Other credit: the grey paper is by TADA.

I love this template from the set, “Recyclables II” from Scrapping with Liz. You can get it today at 25% off at her Super Bowl Sunday sale!

Credits: MK Designs Blur of Color and Garden of Plenty, a Pickleberry Pop collaboration.

What is so great about that? We Digital Scrapbookers can actually use Mobile Monet HD to do fun effects on photos and use them in layouts! You can use the app on your iPhone as well, but, I’d have to play with them both a little to decide if fat fingers would get in the way of true art! Anyway, if you were needing another excuse to buy an iPad check this out!

Here is the layout I did using a photo manipulated with Mobile Monet. It was from a zoo trip in 2008, the bird exhibit was an amazing temporary event. My then three year old loved it but my oldest who was six was afraid to feed the birds!

Here is the photo before I “painted” it:

Credits: MK Designs Blur of Color and Garden of Plenty, a Pickleberry Pop collaboration.

I tried to read up on how to take portraits in the dark with great Christmas Light Bokeh. I didn’t really find a great tutorial. The best tip I found was to use manual settings and adjust them until the background lights look good. Then turn the flash on to photograph your subjects.

It worked pretty well except I had two problems. First, my auto focus is broken on my Nikon. (I forgot to send it in for repair before the Christmas season so I had to make-do.) Second, it is impossible to focus in the dark! So, here is my tip, and what I’ll try next time. Bring an assistant and have them hold a flashlight to shine on your subject while you are focusing! My best photos were taken when I was standing in the lighted walkway. At least I didn’t walk away empty-handed!

Credits: Christmas Ornaments, stitching and string bows are from Dunia Designs. Paper and Word Art are from Anne-Made.

I made a template of this double page spread! You can find it linked up in the rotating box under the log-in at my website DigiScrapQuickPages.com! Anne-Made’s paper really made my layout but there are lots of hanging strings/ribbons that you could use with ornaments to get the same effect! There are some hanging snowflakes and ornaments in this kit…Or you could do some hanging bird houses with birds flying around using this kit! And here is some stitching that has been on my wishlist for a while, there is a great blanket stitch which would be perfect for this layout!