Pieces of Me, Day 3

Another picture post to the originally one-week Beyond Layers challenge Pieces of me. On the third day the topics were Kitchen faucet and Your front door.

The first image needs little explanation. It's the kitchen faucet installed in our kitchen at the time our house was built 11 years ago, very typical in Finland. I still love the tiles we chose for the wall.

Photo taken on 23 February, 2014.

Resources:
- ribbon by Mediamilitia
- texture Waterfront 19 by Kim Klassen
- font Janda Elegant Handwriting by Kimberly Geswein

The second photo dates from last autumn. Without the chrysanthemums, it could have been taken last weekend, or any weekend when we have no longer or not yet snow. Just like yesterday, on a day off we like to work in the garden doing this and that, and the dogs keep watch. They sit or lie at the door, on the lawn, under the trees, occasionally even in the flower beds and let us know immediately if any suspicious-looking strangers try to pass by our yard in cars, on motorbikes or bikes or, horror of horrors, on foot.

Photo taken on 12 October, 2013

Looking at the picture more closely, now I actually notice another thing that tells this is an old photo. The girls (Justiina at the bottom left, Marleena at the top right) nowadays look much more adult. 

Resources: 

 - texture Empty Page by Kim Klassen 
- paper Wineberries Dogwood and Tea 03 by myself (coming soon)
- font Sweetly Broken by Brittney Murphy Design
- PhotoMask 53 by Julie Mead

Pieces of Me, part 2

These pictures are for the second part to the originally one-week Beyond Layers challenge Pieces of me. The topics for day two were Your Breakfast and The Mailbox.

For once, I actually took the photos for the challenge and didn't dig into the archives. The first one was taken at breakfast table - would have liked to have a photo with the doggies lurking at the background waiting for their morning cucumber (they're crazy about it). But as usual, when you want them to be there, they are not, or else they are running circles at such a pace that there's no hope of catching them with the camera. So it was our breakfast only.

Photo taken on 10 November, 2013
Resources:
- texture Carnevale 26 by 2 Lil' Owls
- font Snell Roundhand

The second picture shows the row of mailboxes where ours is, too, seen from the mirror of my car when I went to fetch the post. Wanted to have a photo without showing any of the names of the neighbours, and this way the mailboxes were suitably blurred.

Photo taken on 27 November, 2013

Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep - a new paper pack

I have been rather prolific with scrapbooking paper packs lately. I really enjoy putting them together, layering texture after texture and tweaking them. There are two new sets after this almost finished, so stay tuned if you like them. Like all of them, this one is free to use for anything, download and enjoy.

Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep paper pack

Pieces of Me, Day 1

Changed my username on deviantArt, so I thought I'd create a new blog here as well. It seems I'm not primarily posting scrapbooking layouts, as I thought I would when I first started, so I felt  it a bit restricting to call myself ScrapEija. Now I'm Eija Ite (or Eijaite), exactly as on flickr, and happy with that, since it means Eija Herself. Life's busy, but I have managed to steal some time for photos and for Beyond Layers, which of course has been long officially over, but I'm going to plod along and only then tackle Beyond Beyond. That naturally means that particular course will be long over, too, before I have any chance to work on it, but so be it then. I'll do what I can when I can and am not going to stress over it.  I'm a bit sad to have missed the community side of it, but glad to have met nice people anyway in Blogland.

The pictures I'm posting this time are my take on the originally one-week BL challenge Pieces of me. There were two topics for five days, and I've covered at least one of them for each day. Here's my Day 1 challenge.

Favourite Chair

Resources:
- paper Blue Jean 02 by myself
- font Milton Burlesque NF by Nick's Fonts
- font Skia

The pictures show our Dandie Dinmont male Renny in his favourite chair in our study. I took the picture on in February, but it could be anytime (for example right now). Yes, he is in the small picture as well, hidden under the cover.  He might sleep for a good while under the cover, but at some point it gets too hot there and then follows the really fun part, when he starts manouvering himself out. You see a wriggling, twisting blanket, then it usually falls down and some feet appear under it, then after some shaking and puffing, out dives a dog on a bad hair day. This is a favourite chair, though, because there's almost always somebody there, at least whenever either one of us two-legged family members are in the study.

Another challenge for day 1 was On My Feet. I couldn't decide which one of these picture I prefer, so I'm posting both. The first one shows another favourite spot of the doggies in the study: lying on the feet of the person sitting at the computer. Here we have Renny and his daughter Marleena, while I'm typing this the one warming my toes is Grandmother Foxy.

Dogs on my feet

Resources:
- background texture Scripted by Kim Klassen
- font Bradley Hand ITC

My other take for the challenge is a picture I took of my feet in socks knitted by Marjo last autumn. They have been my favourite footwear at home this winter. I blended two textures by 2 Lil' Owls on the background and used this lovely brushed mask by The Scrappin Cop on the photo.

Homemade Socks

Resources:
- textures Carnevale 45 & Vintique 5 by 2 Lil' Owls
- mask by The Scrappin Cop
- font Windsong by Bright Ideas

Paper pack freebies

Long time no see. I suddenly noticed there are quite a few digital scrapbooking paper packs that I have made and published on deviantArt, but not here. So here goes. They are all free for you to use, click on the image to be taken to  the download page. Enjoy!

Withered

So now we have snow. Although it's now lighter and not pitch-black in the evening, I'm not feeling overly delighted about. I guess I might be happy about it if I didn't know that it'll be there now for the next six months. Yes, it might melt away for a while, but it'll be back, and the melting away is almost worse - although I don't love it, I don't dislike snow as such, but I do dislike slushy roads, slippery roads, icy roads and streets.  Also this means we'll be ploughing and shovelling snow for months and months. Better Half already did the first take yesterday afternoon, and today it was my turn to start. Again, it's not too bad, I actually like it, when it's not too heavy and wet and there's not too much of it, but it's the fact that you have to clear the snow, whether or not you have the time or inclination, if you are to move at all…

I'm off work for almost a week now. Might perhaps get a challenge or two done? Today I cleared one: day 60 at BL. Before I got so far, however, I did some serious pruning in my photo archives from this and last year, and got rid of about a thousand photos, and am feeling awfully accomplished. I got myself Lightroom last month, and don't regret it - it made doing away with the photos so much easier, although I'm only just beginning to learn to use the program.

Anyway, day 60 challenge at Beyond Layers was to use some scripted textures and follow another recipe by Kim. I was not overly enthusiastic about using the scripts on top of the images as such, but I thought I could do something with them if I found the right image. (Read: a photo with enough white space, not green, like most of my non-winter pictures…) So I dug up a picture of leaves that I took about a month ago when rummaging in our old house. The leaves have effectively mummified - they have been standing on the window-sill of our old abandoned house since before we moved away from there, and that was ten years ago. I did slight modification in Lightroom and then followed Kim's recipe as such, until the scripted textures. The first scripted one, Sonnet 2, I blurred at 25 px Gaussian blur, to get only the tone from it, no text. Then I added Sonnet Magic at blend mode screen but turned down the opacity to 68% and masked out most of the script. I didn't add any photo filters, although that was part of the recipe, since I found that would have taken away all depth from my photo.

Withered

Resources:
- texture Sienna, Sonnet 2 & Sonnet Magic by Kim Klassen

Now to see if there'e enough for the birds to eat, when their last feeding rush for the evening starts. They have been crowding our feeding post ever since we started feeding them almost two weeks ago, and I have a feeling I need to do a refill, although I filled everything up to the brim in the morning.

Fragile

Fun for Friday evening: tackled Beyond Layers challenge for day 59. Kim shared a recipe and three textures for us to try out. The problem (for me, at least) with these challenges is the huge amount of time it takes to decide which photo to process. Ordinarily, you'd start building with a picture. Now I'm always looking at the kind of processing done and trying to find a photo I imagine could benefit from it. I never find anything similar to Kim's examples, but somehow I always have to try to match it at least on some level.

This is the third picture I tried this particular recipe on. In the end, I of course tweaked the recipe, but at least I started with it and used the texture, called Paper-Stained Music.

Fragile, c'est son nom

Resources:
- texture Paper-Stained Music by Kim Klassen

I took the photo in May in my little makeshift "studio". I have no idea what these flowers are called, but they opened beautifully from a bell-shape to this translucent disc, after standing for about two weeks in a vase. They were the last of the bouquet to survive.

The text on the picture just plopped from somewhere, when I was staring at the beautiful fragility of the flower on my screen. "Fragile, c'est son nom" I thought, and remembered things I did'nt know I remembered - it's a song by Patrick Juvet, which I suddenly remembered, too. Must be from somewhere early 1980s - the album was called Reves Immoraux, if I remember correctly. I think we had it on a C-cassette. I love how these things pop up, although I've been listening to Baroque Arias sung Andreas Scholl and Patricia Petibon the whole evening.

Sharing at Texture Tuesday.