A few new products

All of these products can be found in the store at Digital Scrapbook Place.

I Love this job!!!

New Posting Challenge - Sweet Danny

Get this wonderful add on pack as a posting freebie.


Just purchase

Sweet Danny page kit and create a page with it. You must post a link to your page in the Sweet Danny Posting Challenge thread at DSP by the end of the day on to get this add on pack for FREE.

That stitched ribbon frame might just be my favorite piece!

It would be great if you would post to my Woodsy's Wall gallery.

I also made up these papers to coordinate with the kit and the add on pack.


There are plenty of fun elements in these products that can be used in a variety of ways! Here are some pages that I made up.

The first uses just the page kit.


Don't they look so cute together? And you know me and my love for out of bounds...I just couldn't resist having his feet hanging out.


This next one uses the kit and the add on pack.

I absolutely adore this photo that my niece took of my son at Christmas several years ago.

The last page uses the kit, the add on pack and the paper set.

This was the photo that inspired the whole collection. It's my husband's kindergarten photo. Isn't he just the cutest thing?????


I hope you all enjoy these new products!

Out of Bounds

One of the very first things that HOOKED me into DIGITAL SCRAPBOOKING was "out of bounds" scrapping. That's where a little part (or a big part) of the picture comes out of the frame. Maybe it's a secret desire to color outside of the lines that makes this style of scrapping appeal to me so much. I'm sure my kindergarten teacher would NOT approve!

Let's face it though...some pictures simply BEG to have something hanging out! Even the smallest out of bounds detail can add so much to a page. This page is a perfect example. The picture alone is cute but the fact that she appears as if she is starting to climb through the frame causes the page to be that much more engaging...if it's okay to use that term for scrapbook pages.


Here's how I did it. I'm using Photoshop CS5 but any photo editing software that allows for layers would work out fine for out of bounds work.
I start with the photo. Like I said, "Cute photo" but lets have some fun with it.


I pick out my frame that I'm going to want her to "start to climb through". I simply lay the frame over the picture and size the photo so that her hand and the top of her head will be covered.
Then I use my polygon lasso tool to create two new layers copied from the original photo. One is her hand and one is the top of her head. The the layer of her hand includes quite a bit of her forearm and the top of her head includes some of her forehead. This ensures that the frame will be covered. I move them up in my layers list so they are sitting on top of the frame. They do not have to be perfect because I will fine tune these layers in the next step.

Still using the polygon lasso tool, I clip away a lot of what I don't want until I get just a little bit of background left. Then using a small soft eraser tool, I clean up the edges of my two new layers. There are many ways to do this step, the soft eraser just happens to be my favorite. In my opinion, the soft edge actually looks better.


So now it's all cleaned up and the layers are ready to go. They are not quite popping out yet. We need a drop shadow for that.


Using settings similar to this, apply a drop shadow to each layer. You can see now just what I included in my layers. You can also see that I'm lazy and only clean up the edges that I know I'm going to need to. The extra drop shadow gets removed later so it really is no big deal that there's drop shadow hanging out where it doesn't need to be.


Now comes the hard part...just kidding...it really is not that hard. The drop shadow needs to be it's own layer so that it can be manipulated a bit and cleaned up. I do that by clicking my right mouse button on the word "effects" in the layer list for that layer and UP POPS this menu list. Click on Create Layer. You'll likely get some warning about how "some aspects of the Effects can not be reproduced with layers." We don't care, click okay.

Now comes some of that manipulating I was talking about. I love the warp tool for this but I imagine you can use a smudge tool if you don't have warp. The goal is simply to give the bottom of her hand a little more drop shadow than the top because that's how it would be if she were indeed trying to climb out of the photo. I did a wee bit on the top of her head but not much. Keep in mind where your lighting source is. The designers at Digital Scrapbook place use a drop shadow with a direction of 120 degrees. SO...using 120 degrees as my guide, I dragged the drop shadow under her finger tips outward in that direction.

Now comes the drop shadow clean up. I simply use the polygon lasso tool to clip the drop shadow off of the top of the photo. I used the edge of the picture frame as my guide.

And that's how it looks. It might take a couple of tries to get the drop shadow manipulated just right so that it looks real after you've clipped off the extra but it's worth it.

SO here's my photo now. To make it easier when I'm working on the rest of the layout, I group all of these layers together so that nothing gets out of alignment. You could merge them too if you prefer.

For this layout I used my Summer Linen Digital Scrapbook page kit which is available for purchase at Digital Scrapbook Place.

I guess this is my Mr. Ed layout. These are just a few of the horses that can be found at the polo stables in the residential development behind my house. I used my Summer Country Page Kit, Summer Country Add On Pack, and the Summer Country Paper Set.

This is one of my favorite pages. Just simply having his elbow sticking out makes it appear as if his hat is sticking out too. I used Dance of the Dragonfly Page Kit, Dance of the Dragonfly Add on Pack, and Dance of the Dragonfly Paper Set for this page.

She is just too cute. This is a PERFECT example of why out of bounds is so great!! This photo was a lot taller than it was wide. I was NOT going to get her full outfit into that square frame. What a shame that would have been for sure! So I performed a little bit of out of bounds magic on the hat as well as the one boot that she had just a step forward on the floor and made it look as if she were stepping right out of the frame. I used my Rodeo Ready Plopper for this page. Ploppers make pages like this way too easy! The Plopper was made from the Gone Country Page Kit, Gone Country Add on Pack, and the Gone Country Paper Set.

Here's another photo that was not going to fit into a square frame. So I let Grandma sit with her legs hanging out of the frame. She looks lovely, doesn't she? This page can be made up quickly with a Plopper as well. This one is called Imagene Doll. Imagene Doll is a delightful character from three of Lisa Wingate's books. I had so much fun reading about her that I simply HAD to make a line Digital Scrapbook products just for her. She has her own Imagene Doll Page Kit, Imagene Doll Add on Pack, and Imagene Doll Paper Set.

I can NEVER resist a well placed little foot hanging out. This page uses my Just Plain Sweet Page Kit and Just Plain Sweet Add on Pack.


Now, this page looks hard but it really is not. I used my Simply Sweet Plopper and used that same technique but with the entire image. I used the drop shadow effect and then created a layer out of the drop shadow. Then I just skewed the drop shadow so it looked as if she were walking into her shadow. Then I lowered the opacity of both the girl layer and the shadow layer so that the texture and color of the background came through. For the other images, I desaturated all of the colors except for the pink so that the page wasn't so busy with color.

I hope you've enjoyed this Out of Bounds tutorial. Let me know if you've tried it. I'd love to see your work!

Dandelion Summer

Today is an absolutely PERFECT summer day here in the woods. Brand new to the store at Digital Scrapbook Place is a PERFECT summer day kit.
Dandelion Summer page kit is brand new today.

The name of the kit comes from the title of a book by Lisa Wingate that just came out this month. The book was incredible! It was all about a very unlikely friendship between a poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks and a rather wealthy, but forgotten, old widowed man. They end up taking a road trip through a string of Southern towns trying to unravel a mystery of family secrets. You can read the first couple of chapters of this book HERE at her website.

I absolutely LOVED this book. I said I would not read it all at once. I said I would savor the story and spread it out. I said I had other things that day that I needed to do. LOL--In the end, I ended up reading the book in one day. I even tried to go to bed with about 70 pages to go and actually laid there wondering what was happening in the story so much so that I slipped out of bed just to finish the book!


I have a posting bonus that accompanies this kit right now. You can get this add on pack absolutely FREE just by purchasing the Dandelion Summer page kit.



I love that bow!! You need to make up a digital scrapbook page with the kit and then post to Digital Scrapbook Place. You also need to drop a link to your page in the Dandelion Summer posting challenge forum by the end of the day on Saturday, August 6th.

It would be great if posted your page to Woodsy's Wall but that's not necessary to receive the FREEBIE. (I used to go by the name of Woodsy Woman over at DSP.)


Here is some extra papers I made up to go with this kit. They will be in the Digital Scrapbook Place Store soon.


Here are a few pages I made up.

This first one just used the kit.
This next one uses the kit and the add on pack.
And this last one uses the kit, add on pack, and the papers.

ENJOY!!