Studio J Love Your Layout - October

Here's another video featuring Close To My Heart's fabulous digital scrapbooking program, Studio J. This video features the Moonlight paper packet and has lots of great ideas for you to use in Studio J or on a traditional paper layout. Enjoy!

Studio J Express Collections

If you've never tried Studio J, Close To My Heart's online digital scrapbooking program, their new express collections are a great way to get started. But even for the seasoned digital scrapbooker, these collections are great and easy to use. Check out the video!

And don't forget that you get a FREE Studio J layout this month when you purchase 9!!

Tricks with Studio J!

Since Close To My Heart is offering a great Studio J special this month, I will be highlighting Studio J in several of my blog posts.

Even though Studio J^® is fast and easy to use, it is helpful to know some great tricks that can make customizing your layouts even more exciting. Here are some Studio J tricks straight from our professional Close To My Heart artists:

1. Customize your background and texture paper. You can change the color and intensity of the background and texture paper included in whichever kit you choose. Simply select the piece of background and texture paper, change the color in the color selection tool, and increase or decrease the intensity of the color in that same popup box.

2. Crop My Stickease^® quotes, titles, and tags. The cropping feature on the My Stickease images allows you to select a section of a quote, title, or tag to use as a border or other embellishment.

3. Create a customized My Stickease image. If you have a specific image in mind to use as an embellishment on your page, you can create a customized My Stickease to fit your theme perfectly. Simply add a text box, photo hanger, ribbon, ribbon slides, and Stickease to create the little suitcase! So easy! Be sure to crop or send elements behind other elements when necessary, and add several elements together for a unique look!

4. Select more than one element at a time. If you want to move several elements of your layout at once, simply click and drag your mouse around the elements you would like to select. Let’s take buttons, for example. After the buttons have been selected, you can click the icons in the popup box to choose to align the buttons vertically or horizontally if you desire.

5. Make faux washi tape with vellum text boxes. To create the look of a piece of clear washi tape, make a small rectangular text box, filled with vellum background (this is the default color for text boxes). You can make the tape strips as large or small as you want, or even layer them for more emphasis.

6. Stretch one photo across multiple photo wells. If you have fewer photos than photo wells, instead of deleting the excess wells, try scaling the picture to a larger size and then copying the picture to other photo wells and matching the photos up until they align with an almost seamless image. This trick works best with photo wells that are adjacent to each other.

7. Create ruffled ribbon. Select “Ribbons” in the drop-down menu under the Embellishments toolset. Choose ribbon tab and rotate the tab so that it is vertical on the page. Then layer several tabs on top of one another, sending every other one to the back to create a ruffled look.

8. Create a jagged border with text boxes. You can create a jagged border simply by rotating multiple text boxes about 45 degrees and making them the same color as the background. Put these boxes on top of a long, rectangular box of another color, and you’ve got a jagged border!

9. Change the background of your layout. Sometimes you may like the photo and journal arrangement in a layout, and yet want to change the background colors. Because photos sit on top of everything else, this is easy to do. Simply pull a journaling box over the space you want for a different background and fill it with a color from the color selection tool or a patterned paper from the Papers toolset. Then, send it backwards until the photo wells are on top of your new background.

Bonus Trick! Use keyboard keys to make embellishments. Did you know that some of the best tools for creating custom embellishments are the basic keys on your keyboard? It’s as simple as typing into a journaling box with no background color. Use periods to make a polka dot pattern, angle brackets to create a trendy Chevron look, overlapping pound signs to make burlap, question marks to make rope, and so much more!

October is the perfect month to give these tricks a try because for every 9 layouts you create, you’ll get a 10th layout for FREE!

Click here to learn more or email me with any questions!

rielage517@yahoo.com

Make It from Your Heart Blog Hop

Today we will show you how to “Make It from Your Heart”! Jeanette Lynton has created a brand NEW “how-to” program to not only guide you, but also inspire you to create beautiful artwork. This amazing publication has so many different pattern blueprints that you can interpret in ANY WAY you want!

Through our blog hop we hope to inspire you to use your own artistic instincts to interpret and create your own artwork. Each of our crafty consultants has chosen a different page of this book to create two projects for you – that’s right two projects with the SAME pattern! One project will follow the blueprint pattern as laid out. The second project will use the pattern “with a twist” to show you how versatile the patterns are.

We are having a giveaway – that’s right blog candy for you hoppers! Lucy of Love 2 Create will be giving away a copy of the Make It from Your Heart – Volume 1. All you have to do to be eligible to win is to leave a comment on each blog.

If you just happened to come to this blog, you should begin your hop at the beginning at Lucy’s blog.

If you came from Theodora’s blog, you’re in the right place!

Here are my projects! I used pattern 4 (pp. 12 and 13) from Make It from Your Heart, Volume 1 to create a scrapbooking layout and a card.

For both of my projects, I used the Dakota paper from Close To My Heart. I used some small black brads on my scrapbooking layout and the retired Rustic alphabet.

For my card I cut some buttons with the Artiste Cricut cartridge and arranged them similarly to the scrapbooking layout. You could use any shape with this pattern, and although it's originally a scrapbooking layout, it works for cards too! I used the stamp set Buttons, Bits, and Bobs for the sentiment, and I finished up the card with some black and brown floss and a little button from our Blue Buttons Assortment.

The next stop to "Making It from Your Heart" is

Stephanie at The Quilted Scrapper.

Here is the list of all the talented consultants who are participating in this month’s blog hop:

• Lucy: Love 2 Create
• Darla: Caution: Crafting Is Contagious
• Michelle: My Creations with Michelle
• Maria: Maria's Paper Craft Place
• Theodora: Celebrate Crafts
• Bethany: Stamping at Home
• Stephanie: The Quilted Scrapper
• Wendy: My Scrapbooking Blog

Thanks for hopping by!