be AUDacious

THANKFUL THURSDAY

One of my favorite authors, Charles de Lint, has a running theme in novels about the concept of coincidence, and how coincidence really isn't coincidence but evidence of some greater power at work in the world. (I can't find the specific novel where he talks about this, or I'd provide you with a passage, because his words do the idea much more justice than mine do.)

I like this concept, though, and I love when I see examples of ideas and concepts converging in my own life. Like today. For the past few days, Ella Publishing has been promoting THANKFUL THURSDAY, an idea that I really love (I also love those gorgeous cards they've been showing!) And today, when I headed over to One Story Down, I see that the feature post is about Gratitude.

image via Paper & Glam

I have lots to be thankful for, but today I want to say a big thank you to all of you who read my blog and buy my digital designs and comment on my photos and layouts, who offer your friendship and kind words to me, even though we've never met in real life. I am so lucky to be able to do the things I love to do, and all of you are the main reason why this is possible. Life is good, y'all, life is good, and you are the ones who help make it so. So thank you. THANK YOU.

Here's a simple printable freebie for you. These are two 4x6 card fronts, designed using my Softly Part Two collab with Robyn Meierotto. All you have to do is click on "view this photo," and then right-click to save the image. Print to a sheet of white cardstock or photo paper, trim to size and adhere to a 4x6 card. Easy. So go ahead -- download and start a circle of gratitude by sending out a THANK YOU card to someone who deserves it today.

View this photo

DHD Mad March Memories Blog Hop

For the first time in a long time, I'm really excited about March Madness because my Murray State Racers have a chance to make some real noise in the big dance! We're making some noise over at Design House Digital this month as well, kicking off our own version of March Madness, digiscrap-style!

The shop has been just overflowing with great products recently, and one that I'm personally excited about is a new one I released last week called See-Throughs.

Essentially, these are 12x12 clipping masks that create a fun peek-a-boo effect on your layout backgrounds. They are an easy way to add an extra bit of pattern to your page, and they can be used in so many different ways.

Here's how to use them: 
NOTE: I am using Photoshop Elements 5.0, so if you are using a newer version of PSE or CS, then things might look a little different, but the steps will essentially be the same. Also, I know that there are multiple options for achieving this same effect -- this is just the way I've always done things. Feel free to share your shortcuts and suggestions in the comments section of this post.

Step 1: Open the See-Through in your program.

Step 2: Select a pattern paper and drag it onto your canvas. Move it to the layer BELOW the See-Through. Resize the patterned paper if necessary.

Step 3: Select a different patterned paper or a solid paper and place on the layer ABOVE the See-Through.

Step 4: "Clip" the second paper to the See-Through by first using the keyboard command CtrlG (Layer > Group with Previous). Then merge the two layers by selecting the keyboard command CtrlE (Layer > Merge layers).

Step 5: Add a drop shadow to the top layer now. Finish off your page by adding photos, embellishments, journaling, and a title. 

credits: star paper from Robyn Meierott's Everyday papers, kraft paper from Robyn Meierotto's Let's Go papers

There are lots of different ways you can modify this product to fit your needs. The masks are easily resizable, so you can clip your photos to them, or cut out portions of them to clip to journaling cards, accent papers, tags, and more. Play around with your background papers too -- use three or four different patterns. Embellish them with stitching, glitter, buttons or brads. You're really limited only by your own creativity. Here's how our Design House Decorators have put them to use on their own layouts.

Katherine

Aria

Celeste

 I'm offering up the See-Through from my tutorial as a freebie for you all; just click on the link below to download it.

Download An-dhd-freebie-seethrough

But wait! That's not all! Hopefully you made your way here from Aria's wonderful blog, which is the 3rd stop on our blog hop. (If you've gotten lost or mixed up, you can always head back to the beginning at the DHD blog.)

If so, then you know that your goal is to gather a letter from each blog post (along with whatever great freebies are available) and then head back to DHD to enter them for a great prize: this gorgeous collab from some of our DHD designers! Plus, you can enter to win a new Wacom tablet (details here).

As one final thank you for being so wonderfully supportive of my designs, I'd like to offer one person a chance to win a $10.00 gift certificate to my shop.  (UPDATE: Winner announced here.) (I've got an awesome collab coming out this week with Robyn Meierotto that you don't want to miss, so a GC sure would be nice to have right now!)

To enter, just leave a comment here on my blog. Want to earn additional chances to win? Here's how:
1) Tweet about the giveaway (with a link to this blog post); come back to the comments and link me up to your tweet.
2) Post about it on your favorite message board; come back to the comments and link me up to your message board post.
3) Share the news on Facebook; come back to the comments and link me up to your status update.
4) Follow me on Twitter and/or like my fan page on Facebook.   

You've got until Wednesday night at midnight CST to comment; I'll use random.org to draw a name on Thursday. After you comment, don't forget to head over to Carey's blog to find your next letter!

Sunday night catch-up session

That feels like what I've been doing all day long -- playing catch-up on all the things that I meant to do at the end of this week but didn't. I was out of town on Thursday and Friday, and I spent all day Saturday helping my mom and aunt begin the process of cleaning out my grandparents' house, as well as organizing my sister's craft room/spare bedroom. 

There are several things from this weekend that I want to remind you of.

I have a sweet little FREE printable that I created for Ella Publishing Co.'s celebration of National Wear Red Day last week. If you didn't visit during Day 1, Day 2, or Day 3, you really missed out on some great projects. 

The printable uses items from my Jar of Hearts element and paper pack at Design House Digital. Shemaine Smith created some gorgeous hybrid tags and a card with these printables; take a look.

Speaking of DHD, February brings back our Daily Dollar Deals. Every day during the month of February, we'll put a couple of new kits in the shop for just $1.00 and they'll stay at this price the entire month!

I introduced my first Dollar Deal product on Saturday: a set of word arts that coordinate perfectly with my 2012 product line (Photo Templates vol 1, Photo Templates vol 2, Digital Kit). You can use these for digital projects or print them out to use them in your Project Life albums. 

Finally, I'd like to announce the winners of my giveaway featuring flair badges from Shelley Haganman's fantastic Etsy shop: 

Dawn M., Jennifer, Anna, and Sue -- congratulations! The four of you will each win a set of Shelley's cute badges to use on your crafting projects. Send your mailing address to me at audneal at gmail dot com and I'll get those in the mail to you by the end of this week.

 

BLOG FREEBIE

A friend requested a copy of the files I used to create my Portrait of a Reader album, so I thought, Why not? I've zipped up the files for you, which includes all 6 patterned papers (8.5x11 .jpg files), 6 index cards (as individual .jpg files and as two 8.5x11 .jpg files with three cards each), plus a set of labeled banners and a set of blank banners. These are saved to an 8.5x11 .jpg for direct printing. I've also included a .psd template of the banner outline so you can customize your own, as well as a .psd template for the index cards. Click here to download the file to your computer; unzip and then enjoy!

Celebrate: Digital Scrapbooking Day!

We're celebrating Digital Scrapbooking Day in style with a couple of blog hops; the DHD Designers have created coordinating mini-kits that I know you are just going to love.

All the Designer blogs are linked up to the DHD Blog (I've also included a list of all the designers and links to their minikits at the end of this post); stop by and check out the other events that we've got going on: challenges, chats, giveaways (you seriously DON'T want to miss these -- they are GOOD), plus a Decorator Blog Hop tomorrow featuring quickpages created from the Designer mini-kits.

Here's my contribution to the hop; click here to download it. (Please let me know if there are any download issues.) 

Make sure you stop in the shop, too, since we've got some great sales going on! Everything is 25% off, so if you've been eyeballing some of my recent releases, now is a great time to pick them up.

If you aren't following me on Twitter yet, now would be a great time to do so; you never know when I might pass out some extra coupon codes. The same applies to my Audacious Designs page on Facebook.

Here's a link to the other DHD Designers so you can grab their freebie pieces of this great kit as well:

Audrey Neal 

Angie Hinksman 

Celeste Knight 

Dana Zarling 

Deena Rutter 

Gennifer Bursett 

Jen Allyson 

Karen Funk 

Karla Dudley

Robyn Meierotto 

Shannon Hegarty 

Tiffany Tillman

 

 

expectantly yours, collaboration: new release, giveaway, & freebie

I am so excited about my product release today -- for a very special reason. A couple of months ago, my sweet friend Emily Powers contacted me about doing a collab with her. Of course, I jumped at the chance, and we bounced a few ideas back and forth. Once we settled on a theme and some colors, we both got to work but it was evident at some point that things just weren't working. We put things on hold while I went on vacation, and then Em took a vacation too. After talking a few times, we settled on a different theme, a different set of colors, and even a different way of putting our collab together.

Basically, we've each created a variety of products for you that feature the same theme and color palette, but are sold separately. So there's a little something for everyone, created in our signature styles, but easily mixed-and-matched.

Before I share my pieces, I want to let you take a peek at what Em's created:

 

The kit is posted in her shop, and it's 30% off on Thursday and Friday. There's a gorgeous album as well, priced at 50% through May 31, if you purchase the kit. Plus, if you stop by her blog, you'll be able to pick up a great freebie too!

But there's another reason to check out her blog. Em and I are both offering you a chance to win the ENTIRE collaboration -- EVERYTHING we've created under the title "Expectantly Yours" -- just by leaving a comment. There will be two winners: one on her blog and one on my blog, so make sure you leave a comment in both places. To increase your chances of winning, you can tweet about the contest or post to your Facebook status line about it; just make sure you stop back by and let us know you've done those things. You've got until midnight on Friday night to leave your comments on our blogs; we'll use a Random Number Generator to choose our winners and announce them on Saturday!

Now let's take a peek at what I've got releasing today, shall we? I really loved this color scheme, and once I started putting together pieces, I just couldn't stop. That's why I've got EIGHT items going up today; you can choose to purchase them individually, you can choose to purchase the kit (patterned papers, elements, and word art), or you can buy the entire collection (shown below). The choice is yours. Even better, all items are 35% off today only! (Do the math: purchase the full collection at 35% off today and that's a $22.00 savings for you -- what a deal!!!)

But that's not all -- I've created a little freebie for you as well. You can click here to download it. As always, thanks for stopping by, and thanks for your ongoing support of my work. It means a lot to me.

Happy {i}NSD!

 

Just a reminder that there are lots of fun activities going on at Design House Digital all day today! We've got lots of products on sale for you, plus some great freebies available during our designer chats. I'll be chatting in the forum tonight at 8 pm CST (that's 6 pm PST, 7 pm MST, and 9 pm EST), so I hope you all will stop by and join me. We'll be playing a fun scrappy game, plus I'll have a freebie paper pack to give away to all the participants, as well as a chance to win the collection of your choice from my shop!

Speaking of freebies, I've got a great little word art pack that coordinates with the paper pack I'm giving away tonight... just click here to grab it. Once the link expires or has been used up, it won't be available again so make sure to grab it while you can.

 

ETA: Here's a look at the coordinating paper pack I made. You can get the download link from the DHD chat I hosted in the forum. There's also a challenge going on in my thread -- you have until noon tomorrow to get your layout created.

blueprints: tools for managing a long-term album project

In my last blueprints post, I set a number of "next steps" for myself towards the completion of the girls' school albums. For quick reference, here they are again:

1. Sort through my "finished digital pages" folder and upload layouts that need to be printed and added to this album.
2. Create a set of "grade level intro pages" that collects basic information about each school year.
3. Sort through my photo folders and determine which photos need to be scrapped (some will be stories that stand alone about the school year, others will support the memorabilia in the album). Use sticky notes on the memorabilia pages to note accompanying stories. Create a master list to help keep this organized.

Today, I want to share with you the tools and processes I've created to handle those three steps. While I'm nowhere close to being finished with this album, that's okay, because by necessity this album has to be an ongoing project -- both girls are still in school. And even though I'm not "caught up," I do have a process in place, which means that I am working on this project as I go, instead of allowing these things to just pile up.

Let's just tackle these in order, shall we?

1. Sort through my "finished digital pages" folder and upload layouts that need to be printed and added to this album.

This is in process. Uploading takes a little bit of time, but it's one of those tasks that I can start and then walk away from my laptop to do other things while it's going on. I have a couple of different folders that hold my finished layouts, and once I upload them to my printer of choice (I use Scrapping Simply), then I make a backup to my EHD and remove them from my laptop. Once those layouts get printed, the backup files are deleted; there's no need to keep the digital file once I have a hard copy. For more information on printing, I recommend this post at The Daily Digi, as well as this one.

2. Create a set of "grade level intro pages" that collects basic information about each school year.

After sorting through all of my memorabilia for each grade level, I realized that there were some basic things that I needed to capture about each year. The easiest way to do this, I thought, was to make a simple 2-page template that allowed me to include the following information: a school photo, the grade/school/year, and general information about the school year.

The template is designed so that the main photo and school information goes on the left page. On the right side, there's room for three more photos (I always seem to have some random extra photos that don't really fit with anything else floating around), and plenty of journaling room. In terms of journaling, I plan to use the following categories: teachers, schedule, friends, sports, clubs, awards, trends, field trips, and favorites. I fully intend to have the girls fill out this information in their own handwriting (which means I'll probably build my pages as hybrid pages, since I'll need to add the school pictures each year, too). If you'd like to download this template, it's available here.

3. Sort through my photo folders and determine which photos need to be scrapped (some will be stories that stand alone about the school year, others will support the memorabilia in the album). Use sticky notes on the memorabilia pages to note accompanying stories. Create a master list to help keep this organized.

I've created one more simple download for you to use to help keep your stories-in-process organized and ready to scrap.It will easily coordinate with the other graphic organizers I've designed for album planning, as well as the basic layout planner I created for this class.

The download allows you to keep track of the basic idea of the story that needs to be told, as well as the photo file names (and folder locations) and the related memorabilia. This way, you can jot down these stories as you work through your folders/content, and then scrap them as the time becomes available. Keeping a list of topics to scrap on hand has always been a real life-saver for me, because it means that when I sit down to scrap, I don't waste any time trying to decide what I want to scrap about.

Download School stories graphic organizer

Here's a sample of what this page would look like filled out -- I've printed several of these pages and tucked them into a 3-ring kraft binder where I keep a number of scrapbooking tools and notes.

With these tools and processes in hand, I'm finally on my way to getting caught up on the girls' schools albums. You know, out of all the boxes of photos and papers and items that my mom has stored away in her ceder chest, the thing I love to look at the most is my School Days book (one of those fill-in-the-blank kind from Lillian Vernon or something like that -- does anybody else have one of those?) I think that's why getting this album planned and underway is so important to me.

As always, Liz and I welcome your questions and comments about this album series. You can leave them here on the blog, or you can stop by our Formspring sites as well:

ask Audrey  |  ask Liz

Design House Digital: Designer Blog Hop FREEBIE!

 

Whether you've found your way here from Melissa's blog, or this is your first stop of the morning, WELCOME to the Design House Digital Designer Blog Hop! 

We put this blog hop together as a way for you to get to know the DHD Designer team a little better. I know that I'm always looking for fun, informative, inspirational blogs to add to my reading list, and these ladies definitely have all of the above! As an added incentive, each designer is featuring a small freebie on her blog; once you've visited every blog, you'll have all the pieces to the kit you see pictured above.

So if you're new to my blog, take some time to look around; I feature a variety of things on my blog each day, including book reviews, guest posts from other bloggers about journaling topics, photography tips, CT work for other designers, lots of eye candy, and whatever else I find interesting. There are a number of sources linked in the sidebars and on the navigation bar across the top. For those of you who've visited before, welcome back and thanks for making me part of your blog-reading.

To download my freebie, just click on the preview image below. My portion includes one patterned paper, 1 embellished set of frames, a buttoned flower, and one title.

You really don't want to miss a single piece of this kit. I sat down to play with it a little bit last night, because these colors were a perfect match for my Easter photos. Here's what I came up with -- I used my Shout It Out two-page template and just condensed it down to one 12x12 page. I love how it turned out!

To get the entire kit simply click on the icons below with the designer’s name and hop from blog to blog, downloading as you go! (Hint, if you just click on the right hand/bottom icons you’ll hit every designer going one way, if you click on the left hand/top icons, you’ll hit each designer going the other way!)

isn't it lovely?

**Note: This post is scheduled to stay at the top of my blog through the weekend. Please scroll down for additional new posts today and tomorrow. I have a lot to catch up on and hope to get it done within the next few days.

All the parts of my Chemistry, Just My Type, Lovestruck, and Rainy Day Love kits are on sale this weekend.

Plus, you can get the Just My Type word art for free and the Labeled Frames for just $1.00.