IOD

EMPE Wednesday!

It's that time again! I get to have fun with someone elses photos for a change. EXTREME MAKEOVER PHOTO EDITION.

Ok, so here's the deal. I'm not afraid to admit my limitations and I've realized through this process that I am a ONE trick pony. LOL. I tend to do the same things again and again with photos. So, I am committed to learning new things and passing them on to you guys while we learn together. In the meantime I decided to take the photo one step further and do some fun things with overlays. 

Thanks so much to Lulu Renshaw for a BeAuTIfUl photo of her daughter and her during her taken at her daughters baptism! Gotta LOVE the way she's looking at her daughter, no? Seriously, so much emotion in this photo I couldn't resist it. 

So here's the before....

perfectly lovely all on it's own, huh? But why not add some drama, cause we're gills after all and that's what us gills love, no? yes. DramA!

So to add the glow and drama I did the same thing (again, i've discovered my one trick pony ways, so no need to scoff) as I did with Zarah's photo a few posts back on another EMPE wednesday. 

Then I took that image and made this:

Kinda took me back to my older days when I found digi and went CaRazY with the opacity and transluscency of my photos, lol. Here is the tutorial for the photo on top w/the overlay. (to avoid confusion, I am doing a tutorial on JUST the photo on top, NOT the transcluscent photo. If you want to know how to play with the translucency that's easy, just make the photo large, put it in softlight mode and then play with the opacity dial on the layers pallette.)

1. Crop the photo square with the crop tool

2. Place the photo on the layout 

3. Drag the overlay on top of the photo ( I used Lynn Marie's from Catscrap if you haven't been to catscrap you're missing OUT! fun stuff for sure!)

4. Making sure you're on the overlay layer use your magic wand and click outside of the overlay so it selects everything outside of the overlay. 

5. Now go to your photo layer (make sure your photo is one layer now, so in other words you've combined the softlight layer with the base layer into one layer, and control x or command x on a mac to cut.

6. Your photo should now look like it's one with your overlay! you can now play with the blending modes and do some fun stuff with it, or simply leave it as I did!

I added a drop shadow to my photo, but you don't have to. No, really, you don't. LOL. I say the most obvious things sometimes. Ah well. 

Oh, the word art is by my Fabulous friend Nancie Rowe Janitz from Scrap Artist . The ShizNam of design! (it's from an oldy, but goody, (the good life) can you tell I haven't been shopping in a while? hee hee)

Hope you had fun with the tut this week. More to come so stay tuned!

A Happy Sunday evening to you all...

I thought I'd take a bit to post some projects I made with my SpaNkIn new kit from my FAVORITE scrapbook store in the whole world... The Green Tangerine . Here is the kit... ( I HIGHLY reccommend ordering this bad boy, they outdid themselves with this one...JUST BEAUTIFUL! Check it out June Kit.

Here are a couple of projects I have done with my kit so far. I've had so much fun with this!

this last one I was inspired by a starbucks ad. 

I plan to make a card and another two page layout before i'm done! I can't stop playing with this kit. Here's why these kits work so well for me. Numero UNO it gets me playing with products other than IOD stuff without having to take the time to research what's new, what's hot and then matching it all up together, kwim? Also it's ALL IN ONE PLACE!!! this has been a HUGE time saver for me! I grab my photos, pull out my kit do my project, put everything back in the same bag (sometimes neatly, sometimes not, depending on what time it is and how soon my husbands going to be home from work and wonder what I've been doing all day!) and voila! Now, I've never done any other kit clubs I confess, but I LOVE the way GT puts theirs together and I KNOW for sure that they're the best value on the kit circuit. Go check it out I tell you. And no, I didn't have to say all this, and they didn't even ask me to. LOL. I just really love to share with you guys what I have found worthy of sharing. Kind of like Oprah's good things. Can't Sally have good things to? yes, she can. She did. This kit club is a "good thing". And guess what??? A little birdy showed me a sneak peak of the upcoming kit... and WoWzA' it's my favoritest YET! I can't WAIT to play with it and show and tell all my sweet blogglettes! Ok, over an' out for now. If you wanna see these projects and more made with the kit in person, go visit the store! If you have any questions call 'em. they're awesome to talk with. Sometimes I just call them to chat. Not really, that would be weird and stockerish. But they are friendly and will be happy to help you! ok. It's 11:00 and my PJ will be waking me up early so I must sign off for now! 

NIGHTY NIGHT BLOGLETTES! Is that offensive that I call you Bloglette? I mean it in a "blog buddy" kind of way... Like I'm givin' you a big noogie. Still offensive? awh well. Sorry. It is what it is and it is that you're my bloglette. lol. I'm a stinker that way, huh?

Oh MY Goodness! I just realized I've not said a peep about CHA and what's coming out!! LOLOL. ok, tommorow we'll have a CHA date, k? meet me in the morning with a cup of coffee and we'll chat!

willy nilly

I love that phrase. It just covers so much. I've been posting to the blog "willy nilly" . This makes twice in one day. wow! I just had to post this beautiful project from a good friend who I met as a student in one of my classes. Truly one of the sweetest gals you'll ever meet! She made this gorgeous mini album using alot of IOD and one of our downloadable mini album kits that are hybrid. Go check out her project and say hi!

leslynsfavoritethings

(you have to scroll down a post or two to find the mini abum. She made it for her parents wedding anniversary!

EMPE Wednesday!

Good morning everyone! As promised Wednesdays will now be "Extreme Makeover Photo Edition" or EMPE Wednesdays as I will here forward refer to them. (I'm sounding very formal this morning, aren't I??) hee hee.

So thank you to everyone who has sent me photos, please keep them coming. When you send them it would be helpful to let me know something you'd like to change about the photo, the reason you're sending it to me so I have a good starting point and can make sure I address the issue that you have with the photo before sending it back to you :-)

I really love the photo that was sent to me by Jennifer Koss. It says SO much doesn't it? Being a fan of sports myself and growing up watching my younger brother play in little league, I was all nostalgic over this photo. So that's the feeling I went with. Nastalgia. I decided to put a retro hue on the photo and play up the old time feel of it while trying to keep the actionish (yes actionish is a word, it's just not in the dictionary yet) feel of it. What I did is very simple, so I hope you don't all feel jipped out of a complicated tutorial today, lol. I actually did get all complicated with it at first, taking it through several steps including selecting the subject from the background making him into his own layer and then making the background black and white, keeping him with the retro hue and blurring the background. I liked the effect alot, but I thought it really complicated the whole point and that is him, making a play and loving baseball. so I went back to the basics and kept it simple. Here is the before picture:

Really a cool picture and not too much to fix really. So I had some fun with the color instead...

Here is the after and what I did:

To get this retro hue feel, just do the following:

1.image>adjustment>hue and saturation

2.slide the center slider down to almost black and white (keep in mind the color will change and get more intense after you deal with the next step, so make it slightly less color than you want in the final result

3. image>adjustment>brightness and contrast

4. play with this until you get just the right balance and some nice play of light on the subjects face. 

so there you have it. simple. Have fun with this technique, I use it for most of my photos. It's an old standby for me :-)

Thank you Jennifer for an awesome photo! I can't wait to get more and get some fun creative tutorials for everyone! 

She did it!!

I need to preface this video and let you know that I'm so proud of Abby. She came home with a hoolahoop about a month ago after a shopping trip with Grandma (among other things, lol) and lo and behold I found out my daughter had MAD hoola skills!! I had no idea. seriously! So, once I saw her talent, I suggested she do this for the church talent show and then she took it from there. She worked for the following three weeks consistently choreographing this routine, I helped her choose a song, but the rest was all her! So, I really wasn't sure if she would change her mind at the last minute when she was in front of everyone, but she didn't! So, here it is....

God's Amazing! Amazing I tell you.

If you've ever been to Lake Tahoe, then you know of which I speak. You can't take in that beauty and not be amazed by the God who created it. 

My family is here at Zephyr Cove retreat center with our church family enjoying our annual church family conference. I look forward to it every year. Yes, it's not easy juggling 3 kiddos in one room, lol. But God is teaching me even through that experience. Last night as Phoebe was popping her little head out of the pack and play and yelling at me ( She was VERY excited to be in the same room with mama and it amped her up until after midnight!) I was grumbling to myself about the fact I knew I'd be getting NO sleep. God immediately brought to my mind our very first family conference we went to. I remember specifically talking to a gal about how I desperately wanted children and my husband and I had tried for several years at that point. I was heartbroken and would have gladly given up 1000 sleepless nights to hold my own sweet baby in my arms. After I remembered that, I looked over at sweet little PJ making her happy noises in a new way, reached over and squeezed my Olivia and smiled at Abby in the bed next to us. Life is GOOD! Even when it might seem not to be. It IS!

Thanks to all the photo entries I've been getting for the EMPE Wednesdays! (that's Extreme Makeover Photo Edition) Keep 'em coming and I'll be  posting them here one or two at a time every Wednesday!

Did I already announce our winner for the message board contest? I think I did, but just in case, lol (i'm too lazy to search my posts!) it was Sweet Karen Bower! (she lifted my spirits with her sweet post!)

Ok guys, I'm going to enjoy the rest of my weekend here in Tahoe, you enjoy yours.... OH! I almost forgot... My daughter Abby is going to do a hoola routine for the talent show tonight! I'm going to get it on video and post it here asap. (She has MAD hoola skills!!) 

Extreme Makeover Photo Edition Wednesday!

That's right dear bloglettes, I've had so much fun making over the photos that were sent to me that I've decided to make this a regular thing. Every Wednesday I'll be showing the before and after of a photo that was sent to me for a makeover the previous week. I'll also go one step further and tell you the step by step how and why of what I did to makeover that photo. So let's get started!

First of all a special thank you to Katarina Damm-Blomberg for the following ADORABLE photo! (I told her I thought the subject looked just like my Olivia! The flower was placed there to cover what very little of her cute bum was showing, I'm super safe that way! lol) 

Here is the after:

Here's what I did and why:

First and foremost I wanted to remove the heavy shadowing from her darling face and brighten the photo as well as add some contrast to make it pop. Here's how I did that-

STEP 1-  image>adjustment>brightness and contrast> slide both sliders to the right as needed

STEP2-   image>levels> play with the slider on both the output and input levels until you see the photo has a nice balance

Second i cropped the photo. Now some would disagree with how I decided to crop this photo because she's not centered or even close to centered. I personally like a little abstract composition to my photos, and I feel that she is still very much drawing the eye. 

STEP1- I set my width and height to a standard size of 4x6 

STEP2- I used my crop tool to crop the photo

third I wanted to remove the toys from the pool as I felt they were a distraction and not relevent to the context of the photo. ( obviously this would be up to the owner of the photo to decide what is a distraction and what lends to the context and memory of the photo! I tend to er on the side of the integrity of the photo and someday might be sorry that I've cut out to much detail from my photos?)

STEP1- I used my healing brush tool which looks like a little bandaid in ps cs3 (probably in previous versions as well) >I used a size 115 brush size and larger sweeping motions to stay with the feel of the water with the strokes because sometimes you can see the feel of the healing brush in the photo if that makes sense. 

Now keep in mind with this tool, it blends out well, but I've found there are unavoidable remnents left behind depending on the placement of the object being removed. For instance, in this photo, the subject had a yellow ball near her head. You can see some slight after effects of that even after it's removed, but my feeling is that you wouldn't notice it if you didn't know it was there in the first place.

Thanks again Katarina for the wonderful photo to play with! I'd love to see a layout with this photo on our blog soon!

Ok, our next brave participant is Zarah from Sweden:

Here's the after:

What I did and why:

I didn't change the size or crop the photo at all. I liked the natural abstract quality of the shot as it was taken, so I left that alone. I felt that the photo needed a little bit of drama. I think that when a photo is special to us, when it holds emotion in it, by adding drama to the effect and look of the photo we help it to reflect how we feel about it to others who see it. So here's what I did to add some of what I could sense Zarah felt about her photo-

first I worked with the brightness and contrast as in the Katarina's photo

STEP1- image>adjustment>brightness and contrast> play with sliders until you like the result, for this photo I wanted drama so I went a little crazy with the contrast

second I wanted to ad an artistic feel to the color and feel

STEP1- duplicate the layer so that you have two identical layer in your photo palette take the foundation layer and do as follows:

image>adjustments>hue and saturation>drag the saturation tab to the left turning the saturation level down about half way to the end

STEP2- now to the duplicate layer (which is on top) do as follows

image>adjustment>desaturate. This will make it black and white

STEP3- now, put this in a blending mode of soft light

STEP4- Here's the fun part! filter>blur>gaussian blur> about a 6 (this will depend on the photo and how much softness you want to add

STEP5- now in the upper right of the layers palette you can play with the opacity of the photo take this top layer down to about 25%. flatten and save as a copy and you're done!

I hope these quick tutorials were helpful to someone, if you found them helpful, or had any input comments or suggestions, please feel free to comment!

winner winner chicken dinner!

I know, I WAY overuse that term, but it's so darn catchy! 

A HUGE congratulations to Karen Bowers for winning my message board posts contest! This is the package she won

Stay tuned into near future posts for more fun contests for IOD goodies! 

For those of you who were concerned for my sweet loolah Phoebe Jane, thanks so much for your thoughts and prayers. She has NOT digressed in her condition and in fact if you didn't know she had Bell's palsy and weren't looking for it you wouldn't even notice. She has the cutest little crooked smile and it's so sweet :-) I feel confident that she will either improve or at the very least not get worse,and that is a HUGE answer to prayer! 

I'm sad to say that nobody sent me their pics for the extreme makeover photo edition (I just made that up and I wish I had thought of that as a post title before! LOL) I'm going to leave this opportunity open. We must have a lot of shy bloglettes out there who don't want their photos posted? Well, I will repeat the opportunity for those that might be interested and are just now reading:

simple as this- send me a photo, one of your favorites that just needs a little 'ooomph' and I'll work it over for free and send you back a full sized file of the photo so that you can use it on a layout or something (I can post that layout here, which would be fun!) I will post the before and after pictures for everyone to see here on the blog. So, send 'em to me wouldJa? First 5 photos sent to my email address (full size photos please!) at salogris@gmail.com qualify for this offer :-) 

Have a GREAT tuesday everyone!

Bell's palsy

Good 'way to early' morning to you all! lol. 

Those of you who aren't on facebook or missed the post... Phoebe was diagnosed with Bell's Palsy yesterday by her doctor. This is a condition where you get an infection, your body tries to fight it off and gets confused and starts fighting the wrong area and the part of your brain that controls the nerves in your face causes the nerve area to swell and then that half of your face starts to droop. She had immunizations on wednesday, Thursday morning around 3am woke up with a moderately high fever ( I didn't take her temp, just gave her some tylenol) then that was it, no more fever. I was changing her diaper yesterday when I noticed she was doing weird things with her tongue like it was too big and her mouth was drooping. Ofcourse I freaked out, called her doctor and was in the Dr.'s office within the hour. That's when he told me what he thought it was most likely. So, I've been researching everything I can on the condition. He said it would most likely be gone within 2 weeks. I thought, "wow. that's a long time, but I'm so glad it's not permanent". from what I'm reading on the internet though it's more typical for it to take 3 months or longer to go away and 15% of people don't recover completely. ugh. That was hard to read. I'm hoping her doctor (who is REALLY a good doctor) has good reason to believe that she will recover so quickly. Like maybe because she's an infant?

the good news is that they say it progresses rapidly (he warned me it's going to get really bad really quick and I will likely need to put a patch over her eye to keep it closed because her eye will go limp and not shut. ugh)and when I went in this morning just about an hour ago to feed her, she was able to nurse and it was dark, but I couldn't see any obvious signs of progression. So, I'm praying that her case is really mild and just corrects itself quickly. I'm not even sure if that ever happens, but I know that with God it IS possible even if it's never happened, so I'm praying. My sweet little loolah. :-( 

I will tell you this. You may call me a fanatic but I will never again give my kids immunizations. EVER. I'm done. It kills me that I let someone inject her with so much that her little body couldn't take it and freaked out. They're SO tiny, their little bodies can't handle that poison. I talked to a friend last night who's baby was severely altered for a (thankfully) short time after her last immunizations at 3 mos and my neighbors little boy now has a chronic case of shingles from the chickenpox vaccine. So, that's enough for me. all done. I know there's a lot of controversy about this, and I don't desire to get into all that. I just know that God has charged me with the care of three precious little girls and I will decide what happens to them, not the masses and what they say is best, and NOT the medical community at large. Wayne and I. Ok.... enough about that because I'm getting fired up the more I talk about it. stupid vaccines. lol

ON to happier things.... I did end up going to my scrap night at the Green Tangerine last night. My mommy guilt was kicking in and I was going to just stay home, but my mr. wonderful said I was being silly and should go, for goodness sake. lol. Since she goes to bed at 7pm, I just waited til later and headed over then. but I was still able to make some progress on my halloween album. I'm doing 8x8 and I got 2003,2004, 2005 done and I'm using the same exact layout for every double page spread, then I'm going to print and embellish. It should be super fast and it's been so fun so far to remember all the kids different costumes and what we did that year! I went with a SUPER simple and linear style for the layout, but I plan to make it super cute with the embellishments. I'm using some Catscrap papers and then some halloween epoxies by reminisce and journal stickers by doodlebug I think.... I'll post them when I'm done ofcourse. When I make my year in review layout I'm going to use IOD stuff only so that I can make it available to y'all as a set of quickpages complimentary :-) I also intend to make some blog digs for those of you that have been asking, it really is on my to do list! 

Wow, this post is getting long, so I better sign off for now... I'll talk to everyone soon and post the winner of the IOD loot (see entry a couple days ago) tonight or tommorow morning.... I extended the contest to give more time....

a lot to say... so grab a cup of coffee...

ok... I've got a lot to talk about so let's get started!

I'll make it nice and orderly and give them each their own numbers:

1. my email address for those wanting to send pictures for the free photo makeover is salogris@gmail.com (In case you missed that recent post the first 5 people to send me one of thier fav photos will get them madeover and sent back for free AND the before and after will be posted here on the blog, so NO nudies...heee hee!)

2. I'm going to The Green Tangerine for some serious crop time tonight. They might still have space and it's an AWESOME place to scrap if you've never been there! It's the happiest place on earth for a scrapper :-) so today I'm creating some page templates for some theme albums I want to tackle. I've been pouring over Cathy Zielske's 'Clean and Simple Scrapbooking' (interjecting side note here, you do NOT have to be a clean and simple scrapper to enjoy this book and it's great ideas! In fact I tend to mix my distressed and embellished look with the linear feel of clean and simple and it's my look for now. you know how that goes, lol.)  and finding some great ideas of how to tackle my mounds of neglected events pics. See, I'm NOT an event scrapper, Becky Higgins and I are polar opposites, though I admire her greatly. So in Cathy's book she gives the great suggestion of creating one album to house all my halloween (or other events) photos in a repetetive pattern. I'm going to use this idea for halloween, kids school And year in review. I'll let you know how it goes and post some examples here soon. Also, I will make the templates I come up with complimentary and downloadable so you can use them if you so wish!

3. hmmm. hmmmmmmmm. is that all? I thought for sure I had LOTS to say. And here you are all ready with coffee in hand. I guess I better think of something. OH. I remember now! If you like the paintables layout that I made for my last class, but weren't able to take it, I have a really fun thing I came up with. I'm going to sell custom paintables kits with different paintables and embellishments to choose from! I'll be putting that together and posting the different options here. Keep in mind for shipping purposes you may want to choose more than one because the best shipping price I came up with is $11.95 for a flat rate box, it's the 12x12 size that's killing me I think. I considered rolling the paintable to avoid the large box, but I'm just a little weary of doing that, kwim? If someone can find a better shipping price for me, than link me up and I'll consider it :-). So keep an eye out for the custom paintables kits to be posted here! For an example of a paintables project look at our 'IOD classes' album over to the right.

ok, I think maybe that's it, but if not I'll come back and chat more... I'll leave you with a few of my latest layouts. Some hybrid, some not. See if you can tell which ones I used the computer for? hmmmm???? can't? I didn't think so. Don't be a digi hater, the computer is an AWESOME tool to use in your scrapping! If you have any questions about how I did anything then post it in comments so I can address it here on the blog because others might be interested to know. (Like maybe you want to know how I made the tissue chipboard letters in the '15 days old' layout, or the distressing in the 'P' on the phoebe 6 mos old layout??? hee hee.)

So, have a GREAT Friday everyone, thanks for sharing a cup of coffee with me and maybe I'll see you tonight!