Posts Tagged ‘scrapbooking’

New Designs at DHD

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Here’s another shameless plug for all of the design work I’ve been doing.

The last few weeks I’ve been focusing a lot on hand-lettering. I named the collection Thesaurus, because each kit has eight different ways to say one thing. Here are a few of my favorites.

{oh, hello! kit: $1.99}

{so pretty! kit: $1.99}

{play with me! kit: $1.99}

{oh, baby! kit: $1.99}

{gee, thanks! kit: $1.99}

{oh, sweet! kit: $1.99}

Can you tell that I’m obsessed with cursive & calligraphy? Today is “release day” for this kit, so you can buy the entire collection here at 30% off ($6.99) for the next 24 hours.

I don’t design with an eye so much toward scrapbooking as toward general print applications.  This word art and the rest of my Digital Design House work is meant to be versatile enough to use on web pages, personal cards, silkscreens, iron-ons or anything decorative. I get a lot of inspiration from seeing my artwork in action, so let me know what you do with these kits! I’m a sucker for uploads to the flickr group and/or comments.

Pom Poms & Paper Circles

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Many of you who know me, know that I’m not a scrapbooker. My mom has always been the one with the eye & the patience for scrapbooking. She’s awesome at it. I do, however, have an unhealthy obsession with scrapbooking supplies.

In the last 8 or so years, I’d say the scrapbooking industry has really come into its own. Papers & embellishments no longer boast of unsightly forest greens and maroons and the artwork is artwork, not some automatically generated microsoft clipart on repeat. Ew.

Scrapbooking is all about pretty these days. No? I have a friend who works at We R Memory Keepers in the product design and development end of things. She’s been back and forth from Salt Lake City and China a few times in the last few months in preparation for last week’s CHA. WRM has been very busy coming out with new papers & tools to make our eyeballs pop out of their sockets. What you see above and below is a small fraction of what they’ve been working on. When Jen gave me the samples* to play with, I could tell she was really excited (and proud) of what they’re releasing to stores soon. Aren’t these papers and embellishments fun?

I think I need to host a baby girl shower soon. I think these papers would be so cute cut out into little doilies for serving cupcakes. The stamps would be an easy & inexpensive way to add color & cute to black and white printed invitations. The pink flower lace you see above is adhesive backed. AND Glittery. Isn’t that genius?!? Use that for a closure on an envelope or wrapped gift. Awesome, right?

So, I didn’t have time to plan and/or execute a baby shower, but I did have time to spruce up Penelope’s room a bit. Remember the scalloped border I did a couple of weeks ago?

First, I just want to tell you how much I loved your comments. I loved hearing from you & I really appreciate how nice you are to me. Thank you! Second, the scalloped border was getting a little lonely. A lot lonely. He needed a friend up there by the ceiling, so I made a little mobile for the Nels. This particular arrangement was heavily inspired by this beautiful nursery I saw here. I was just blown away at how gorgeous it was & had to have it. . . part of it, at least.

I made tissue pom poms via Martha Stewart, attached them to ribbon and stapled them to the ceiling. Then, I cut a million and a half irregular circles out of the WRM Hippity Hoppity paper and sewed them together. Sewing paper is tremendously easy and SUPER satisfying. If you haven’t done it, try it. NOW. You don’t need any special equipment, a threaded sewing machine would do just fine. You can’t tell from the picture, but the little circles spin around gently from even the softest little breeze. It’s so mesmerizing.

If you don’t have a sewing machine, or you’re too afraid you’d mess up the paper trying, you could buy pre sewn paper from WRM. I was just a little giddy when I saw the 12×12 sewn sheets of paper. Did I mention that I love sewn paper? It’s wonderful!

Not wanting to cut up this perfect piece of paper, I wanted to do something with the whole sheet. Again, I’m not a scrapbooker, so a pretty 12×12 with pictures of the Nels on it won’t happen. A door sign with almost all of Penelope’s nicknames was just what the doctor ordered. Penelope really has so many little nicknames, and they’re all just so cute, so I did a hand-calligraphed cloud of her nicknames. When I showed Chris, he let out an audible, “ooOOoooOOoo!” That made me feel so good inside.

The above paper is a nice cardstock, so I just needed some double-stick some tape, ribbon and a thumb tack to post it to Penelope’s door. It’s thick enough that it doesn’t look silly all by itself, but I have to admit it would look cute framed in swirly gold.

*note: I received free product.

This Week at DHD

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Are you sick of my talk of digital scrapbooking, yet? Seriously I want to know.

If you haven’t heard of DHD or what’s going on with all that, you should probably check it out. TODAY. All new releases are 30% off every Thursday. There are over 70 new releases today. That’s a lot if you ask me! I didn’t release a ton of stuff this week, I’m still just settling down from Christmas and the New Year, but my goal is to release a new collection or parts of a collection every week. I’m not sure how realistic my goals are as I’m SUPER new to the digital scrapbooking thing and there’s quite a learning curve.

dhd-melissaesplin_psychcirq_preview

click image to enlarge

So among the few releases this week, I managed to make a blog kit. This is no cutest blog on the block kit. My first blog kit is like a blog on acid. Not that I would know. I’m hoping that one or two of you out there might like it. Maybe. Snatch it up for the discounted price of $5.59*. Holy crap, that’s cheap. Dirt cheap!

This surely won’t be my last blog kit. I redesign my own blog often enough, you’ll be seeing a lot of these in the future.

dhd_melissaesplin_winterlandia_elementspreview

click image to enlarge

I really wanted to do a winter theme collection, so I did. It’s a mini collection. I really like scrolling. So I made snowflakes out of my handmade scrolling. Snatch these graphics for $4.19*. Hope you like them.

So I really want to open up this blog post to some serious conversation. I’d really, really like to hear what you think about digital scrapbooking, what you think of what I’ve done so far (do I dare? EEK!) and what you’d like to see more of in the scrapbooking industry. Will you help a girl out and let me pick your brain? Heck, I might even send a freebie your way if you leave a thoughtful comment!

*These discounted prices are valid today (January 7, 2009) only.

Design House Digital

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It’s been less than a week since my last day in an office and I’m already busy, busy on new projects. The best and most exciting one (besides the project of being a mom again) is Design House Digital. It’s new. It’s all about digital scrapbooking and it’s live tomorrow, Jan 1st.

dhd-2

I’m not sure if any of you are familiar with digital scrapbooking, so let me fill you in. It’s like paper scrapbooking, except all it really requires is Photoshop. DHD is the brain child of designer Jen Allyson Nugent (aka Project Girl). She’s very familiar with digital scrapbooking and has been a fabulous inspiration and mentor. You should probably check out her blog. It’s full of all sorts of pretty things.

I’ve just been bursting with excitement about my first kit. This first kit is inspired by the genius of Ellen Gallagher and Studio on Fire’s Peacock wedding announcement. SOF is my favorite. And I wish to maybe someday have a smidgen of their coolness.

dhd_melissaesplin_psychcirq_detailpreview

My idea behind this collection was to do something a little crazy. A little unique and a lot loud. The neon colors help with the volume, don’t you think?

dhd_melissaesplin_psychcirq_alphapreview

This font is all thanks to my Intuos4. Now that I think about it, this whole collection is thanks to the intuos. I love that thing.

I hope y’all get some time between partying and resolution-making to stop by Design House Digital. Sign up for their newsletter and get a free kit. And after midnight please stop by to shop, browse tutorials and inspiration galleries. Oh. And don’t forget, everything is 30% off this weekend! Take advantage!

You’ll be seeing a lot more of this and other crazy things in the future. Do you digi-scrap? What are you looking for in a kit?

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