Reason's I love Photoshop

I'm so happy I could cry - and I did! My husband probably thinks I'm a little crazy. It's not a new thing, but a couple of days ago when he came home for lunch I was crying as well as jumping up and down with excitement. He was probably hoping I had just won a lottery or something (which would have been super exciting considering I haven't bought any tickets), but no. I was happy because I had just learned two new great tips on Photoshop Elements!

I know - I'm sure you're agreeing with my husband on the crazy thing now. But for a self-taught Photoshop user, anything that's awesome and saves me time makes me SO happy.  So I'm going to share with you the link to the website that brought me to tears with their great tutorials - jessicasprague.com.  Go to free stuff/tutorials.

So I thought I'd share with you a few before/after photos to share the reasons why I love, and use, Photoshop Elements.  Click on any of the photos to enlarge them.

Reason 1:  Color correction.  Last July I went with my parents and my olders sister on a trip to Idaho, Spokane Washington, and Montana.  I hope to blog about it sometime because I have some amazing photos, but I have lots of catching up to do.  On our trip we went to Glacier National Park.  BEAUTIFUL!   I loved it so much and saw some amazing scenery, but most of my distant shots had sort of a haze about them.  The following photo is one of my first after entering the park and is of Lake McDonald.  I did a soft focus and saturation and contrast adjustments to bring out the colors that were lost in the haze.

Reason 2: Contrast adjustments.  While in Glacier NP I was amazed by these flowers we saw all over.  The plant is called Bear Grass and I had never seen it before.  The close-up shot I took of it turned out good, but a soft light filter and contrast adjustment really made it pop.

Reason 3:  Photo effects.  A while back I started making WANTED posters of Noah and Evan for their bedroom.  I found some cute barnwood frames at D.I. for $1.00 each!  Anyway, their not done because I can't think of what they are wanted for yet, but here's the photo of Noah for his poster.  I did an old photo effect on it.  When I put it on the poster I will also make the edges rough and torn looking.  It's fun to take photos like this because they can wear any colors in the photo and it doesn't matter in the final print.

Reason 4:  Digital Scrapbooking.  This was the whole reason I bought Photoshop Elements in the first place, and yet it's what I use it for least now.  I have good intentions though!  I really am going to continue to scrapbook our family photos digitally, I just haven't been doing it much lately.  But it is SO fun.  I love the look I get, and there are tons and tons of free digital scrapbook supplies available on the internet.  You really shouldn't need to buy any supplies after a while of collecting.  I have made a purchase only once for specific supplies I wanted.  I get freebies everyday from www.scrapgirls.com in their daily newsletter, so I love them and will mention them specifically, but you can do searches, or visit my links in the sidebar for others.

Keeping digital scrapbooking in mind, I also take lots of photos of things now to use as backgrounds on my pages.  Things like water, rocks, grasses, sky, and all sorts of textures make great backgrounds and go so well with your photos because they are from the same locations.  On the following scrapbook page I used a photo of some scrub oak at the dinousaur park for my background and parts of other photos I took as embellishments.  This is the title page of our trip to the dino park.

Reason 5: Cloning and swapping heads.  Sounds kind of like something that would happen in a science fiction movie, but when you want to get a perfect group photo these techniques are priceless.  People pay big money for this, so it's a great thing to learn to do on your own.

In November of last year my in-laws had their 50th anniversary party.  With all of their kids and their spouses there it was a great opportunity to get a group photo.  It happened to snow while we were in the restauraunt celebrating, creating this beautiful backdrop for our photo.  One of my neices took the photos with my sister-in-law's camera and afterward I had her e-mail them to me to edit.

The photos turned out really good, but you know how it is, there's always a few things you want to change to make it perfect.  Everyone got to pick which one was their favorite and then I swapped a few heads or faces using the selection tools to make everyone look their best.  The biggest change was moving a brother-in-law out from behind his wife a little so he showed up better.  I swapped three heads total.  Click on the photo for a larger view so you can see the changes - maybe.

The cloning tool was also really important for this photo.  You have to use it when swapping heads, but in addition, you can add more background where needed.  In order to get everyone centered I had to increase the canvas size and then clone more snow in front of us to make it perfect for an 8x10 photo.  You can also see how these look in black and white (my favorite) and sepia.

Reason 6:  For fun.  While we were hiking through the rainforest in Hawaii we kept commenting on how Jurassic Park was filmed there and how we really wouldn't be surprised to see dinosaurs walking around in that environment.  After our trip to Hawaii I put together a slideshow to show the whole Moon Family to watch and I couldn't help throwing in a few dino's for fun.  In this photo my Mom was admiring the flowers hanging from the tree, but I had another photo of the same dino in the scrapbook page above that went with the lighting in this photo perfectly.  I used other dinosaur photos and even the "Warning: Live Raptor Area" photo to throw a bit of humor into our slideshow.

Reason 7:  Blogging!  This is what I used to make these photo collages and to make sure that every photo I blog looks it's best before I post it.  It may seem silly to even blog about Photoshop, but if it makes me that emotional, it deserves to be here.  Try it!  It may bring you to tears also (maybe bad ones at first, but hopefully good ones with the help of great tutorials).

Baby Burpies

I have done many seasonal things I want to post, but who wants to see Halloween stuff in December?  So I guess I'll wait a year to post them.  So here's another quick non-seasonal post until I get going for real again.

It makes me feel really old, but a couple of months ago my niece had the first Great-grandchild of our family - a darling baby girl.  I was so excited to make something cute for a baby because there are so many great ideas out there now, and well, I'm just not in that phase of life anymore although these made me wish I was.  So after much browsing, debating and shopping, I decided to make some cute burprags from the wonderful tutorial I found on the blog of the amazing Abby from A FEATHERED NEST.  Love her.  She seems like such a talented but approachable person who really inspires me.  She has many other great baby things on her blog also, so if you are in that mode, be sure to check it out.

So here's my version:

I pre-washed the purchased cloth diapers and fabric so they would be ready for baby to use.  I altered the dimensions of the strip of fabric I cut out slightly from Abby's instructions to fit these cloth diapers better, but pretty much followed her steps exactly.

Here's the basket of Burpies I wrapped up for my niece and her baby:

I LOVED these fun fabrics that I found at Hobby Lobby, and the basket I got on clearance at Lowe's.  You could totally make burprags to match your baby's outfits!

What I would have given to have these when my kids were babies!  They were the spitty-uppiest (new word) kiddos that I have ever seen so I always had cloth diapers surrounding me.  I would have loved to have been surrounded by these.  Sure I got some cute little ones from friends and relatives who meant well, but I needed something BIG and ABSORBENT!  I think that's why I had to make her these.  I could think of nothing I would have wanted more (well, besides less spit-up).

The greatest part though, is that every time I see my neice she tells me how much she loves them and that she doesn't use anything else.  Makes me :)

New Party Blog

I really have been blogging. Just not here recently. I've been in the process of switching some blogs around a bit and I started a new blog called Birthday Blueprint. Yes, it sounds familiar. Actually I came up with that before I came up with Cerebral Blueprint. A few years ago I decided that if I owned a party store I would name it Birthday Blueprint. So that just had to be the name of my party blog.

So anyway, I will get back to this blog eventually, not that anyone is still checking here and will read this. But if you happen to be amazing, and do read this, go see what I've been up to on Birthday Blueprint.

Cake and Cake Wrecks

Sometimes you try really hard to do something meaningful. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. This didn't.

This was our Valentine's dessert on Saturday. I didn't want to take the time to find my good buttercream icing recipe so I tried this one instead. The kids (except Stauney) hated it and cut the icing off (Logan just found some undecorated ones and had one of those instead).

I also saw a cute picture of some chocolate dipped fortune cookies on top of cupcakes, so I bought some chocolate melts for that purpose, but never got around to buying the cookies. I did have these marshmallow Peeps though and combined the two ideas! Yes, I know - they're not cute. We all really liked them though in a weird let's-take-a-bad-food-and-make-it-unhealthier sort of way. You know, like deep-fried Twinkies! So overall, the dessert was not a huge success like last year's fabulous Molten Chocolate Cakes. I'm okay with that and willing to post it on my blog anyway.

I have definitely learned in life that sometimes the mistakes are way more interesting than the masterpieces. So to prove my point, you have to take a little side-trip to a hilarious blog I came across called CAKE WRECKS. I have been laughing so hard I've been crying while reading it tonight. Just be sure to come back for the cake recipe below (which did turn out) that has been in our family for as long as I've been eating chocolate cake. Which, judging by the gray hairs I've (sadly) been discovering lately, has been a pretty long time.

WILMA'S BEST CHOCOLATE CAKE

2 cups sugar
3 heaping Tbsp. shortening
2 eggs
1 cup milk mixed with 1 Tbsp. vinegar
3 cups flour
6 Tbsp. cocoa
2 tsp. baking soda
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. vanilla
1 cup boiling water

I have no directions on my recipe (which is the way my Mom usually gives them to me) other than bake at 375 degrees for 30-35 min.
Just mix it all together using your current cake-making skills.

My Mom got this recipe from a lady in our Ward growing up named Wilma ? Mom, if you can figure out how to post a comment then you can let us know her last name. All I know about her is that she made good cake.

I also have another favorite chocolate cake recipe that uses boiling water. I got it from an American lady named Nina Smith in our Ward in Japan. (She also introduced me to Japanese recycle shops - and I've got to post about that sometime). It's late so I won't post that recipe now, but I'll add it later (since most of you that read my blog already have Wilma's recipe). I told my Mom once that I thought it was better than Wilma's. She tried a bite and told me it's not. I think sentimental recipes always taste the best.

Now, I just have to figure out what to do with the 4 cups of discusting frosting left over in my fridge. Stauney won't let me throw it out because she loves it and wants to eat it all on graham crackers! I think that by Saturday I will be justified in saying it's not safe to store it for longer than a week.

Now if you haven't gone to Cake Wrecks yet, you have to go. I know I have some photos that would probably go on there if I made them public. But at least I'm not a professional.

The Bucket Hat

With all of the frequent snow storms we have been having, I have been spending a lot of time outside either shoveling or snow-blowing.

Here are my problems with that:

1. The coat that I wear for this purpose doesn't have a hood.
2. I have naturally curly hair. Lots of it. When it gets wet, even if I've straightened it, it goes back to curly.
3. I HATE knit hats. They are usually too tight and just really look dorky on me.

I was browsing blogs one night last week and I found this cute hat pattern on the Purl Bee blog. Here's the link to John's Favorite Bucket Hat. It didn't look tight, and the pattern looked easy, so I decided to give it a try.

The yarn they recommended was out of my price range, but I really liked this yarn that I found at Michael's that is 25% wool and SO soft and only $5/skein. I thought 1 skein would be enough, but I ran out with 1 row left, so I had to go get another. The pattern was really easy to follow and nothing hard in it. All you need to know are chain, single-crochet, slip stitch and how to count. I worked on it on-and-off one day while picking up kids, but I think from start to finish it took me about 2 hours. Now that I've done one I think I could do another in 1 hour.

Although I made this hat for myself, Logan made a much cuter model.

I think I got a bit reserved with the yarn when I started running out of my first skein near the end, so my stitches may have been tighter than they should be, it doesn't flare out as much as the one in the instructions.

I love my new hat. I even wear it around the house sometimes when I'm cold because it warms me right up. My family also loves my new hat because they have all asked me to make them one too.

Hershey's Nugget Boxes

I start browsing on one blog and link to another, then another, and so on until I forget where I started. There is so much creativity out there it just amazes me and I get lost in it - usually much too late at night. So I'm not sure what blog I heard about Nugget boxes on, but after seeing how cute they were Stauney and I decided to make them for teachers for Valentine's Day.

We found the patterns on a Split Coast Stampers thread. This lady has made all sizes of them from 3 up to, I think 24. If you look through the gallery on this site you can see pictures of tons of them in various sizes and styles. If you want to watch a video of how to assemble a 1/3 box you can go to this blog Chic n' Scratch. This is a WONDERFUL blog full of so many cute things!

The patterns do not print out full-size. So be aware that you are using them just to read the measurements off of. We did the Short 6 pieces box.

I decided to use my digital scrapbook stuff to make it easier, quicker, and cuter. This is how I printed off the wrappers to wrap around the Nuggets. You make each wrapper 1"x3" and print them on a regular paper, not cardsotck. Then I used the same papers and printed them on full sheets of cardstock to make the boxes and the sleeves to go around them. You could get 3 boxes this size from one 8 1/2"x11" piece of paper, and another for the 3 sleeves.
Stauney and I had a lot of fun designing these and I think they turned out a lot cuter than if we would have just wrapped plain pattern paper around them. I get almost all of my digi-scrap stuff free. There are many sites out there for free downloads. I have been signed up on Scrap Girls daily newsletter for years and they give you a freebie daily (two a day during Dec.), so that's probably where I got these papers and embellishments. I usually use Photoshop with my digital stuff, but for something simple like this I just used Microsoft Publisher to design the wrappers.

This photo shows them all finished. The gold wrapper Nuggets have almonds in them, the silver are plain, and the top middle one is the back of one of the pink boxes. Noah's teacher is a man, so he gets the red/black ones. You can also fit 1 small Kit Kat in the place of 3 nuggets. I also saw some really cute longer boxes, like a 1x6 with a full-sized candy bar in them.

I finished them off by adding a contrasting band of paper around the middle to keep it from opening in transportation and then hooking the tag on top of the band. They were pretty quick and simple to make once I got the hang of it. We are now planning boxes for other seasons. Be sure to check out the blogs I mentioned above for tons of more ideas for dressing up candy.

Now the only problem is they are too cute to eat! Noah's teacher probably won't have a problem with that though. He is a man after all.