Owl Treat Box – Free template and tutorial



Valentines day is right around the corner, no better time to get your little Valentine treasures all ready to give.

This free template is available on my blog at www.deenarutter.typepad.com .

Here I will show you how I used the template to personalize my little owl.

I used some paper from my SCOOT collection as well as the template.

Open up the paper you want to use.  I used SCOOT-hills-white for the box.

Place the pillow box template and make a clipping mask.

Place the other paper you want to use for the wings.  I used SCOOT-dots-white.

Make a clipping mask with the wings too.

Place the rest of the images as layers on your canvas.

I put my owl face directly onto my pillow box.

Print.

Get scissors, glue, scoring tool, pencil, and ribbon.

Cut around images.

Trace box template on back side of pillow box.

Score where you traced and crease.

Glue flap onto the inside of the owl.

Glue wings onto the back of the owl.

Punch a small hole through the top of the pillow box.

Thread the ribbon through and tie at the top.

Fill pillow box from the bottom with your goodies.

Flaps will fold right up into place if creased correctly.

Thanks for checking out this little tutorial.  Personalize your owls and add them to the DHD gallery!

Hybrid Light Covers – 20 Days of Christmas

December is here and it’s time to decorate!

I hope you are feeling festive today because I have a really fun way to decorate your indoor lights! We will be creating Christmas Light Covers! I originally saw the idea for a Halloween theme on Pinterest and thought it would be perfect to use for Christmas as well!

So here we go! It’s really easy! The first thing you need to do is pick a bold colored Christmas kit – I chose Shannon Hegartys’s Peppermint Papers because, well,  they looked so yummy!

Additional supplies:

*small paper cups (I used dixie-type cups)

* a string of Christmas lights

* craft knife

* scissors

* black marker

* double sided adhesive

I used PSE 7 for this tutorial.  So here’s what you do:

Choose three different patterns from your paper stash.

Open a letter size document (8.5×11) and drag the first pattern to it.

Save as a .JPG and print the  image.

Repeat above for the other two patterns.

You should have three sheets printed. This will make 12 cup covers.  If you would like a longer strand of 24, then print out three more sheets.

Take one of the small cups and very carefully peel it apart. Start with the rim at the top and uncurl it and then carefully rip the seam. You should have a nice curved template of the side of the cup. Discard the bottom piece. See photo below.

By tracing your template close together on the back of each sheet you should be able to trace four cup covers.

Cut out each one using scissors.

Each cover will fit very snuggly around the paper cup. Use strong double sided adhesive to seal.

Now slice a tiny X on the bottom of each cup using a sharp craft knife.  This will allow you to feed the light bulb through the cup cover so don’t make the X too big as you want a snug fit.

Now just string up your adorable light covers on a window or fire place mantel!

*frame from Shannon Hegarty and elements from Lori Whitlock

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial! Have a Merry Christmas!

Tutorial: How to use the Selective Color Tool in Photoshop

Hello, Hello! Karla here and I’m going show you all how you can tweak your colors in Photoshop using the Selective Color Tool! I use it ALL the time to make the colors on my photos pop or change the color entirely. You can even use it on your scrapbook supplies and papers! Let me show you how using Photoshop or Elements.

Here is an original photograph of some pot tops…or something lol…

Now this looks pretty cool like this but I thought the colors could use some punch. But I only wanted to change the red and teal plates for this example. The selective Tool is perfect for this because it’s an easy way to target select colors. To use it your going to go to IMAGE > ADJUSTMENTS > SELECTIVE COLOR

Then your going play with the settings. 

I decided to change the red and blue pot tops. Since the blue color of the tops looks kind of teal-ish; the Cyan option worked better then the Blue. To pick what color family you want to change you just pull down the COLOR tab. I wouldn’t worry about the custom tab. I then got this result

So then it was ready to scap ^_^ I used this technique on all the photos in the layout below.

[ kits used: Fly Girl, Digi Essentials (stitches), Digi Essentials 5 (letter brushes) and Digi Essentials 7 (Metal Brads), Page template from Tiffany Tillman ]

Some things to note:

• To get reds more red, I start by selecting the red color from the color pull down menu. The next step I do is lower the CYAN percentage. Anytime you want to pump up or down your reds, the Cyan % does it beautifully! And as you can see from my example I tweaked some of the other settings as well.
• The blue color of the tops looks kind of teal-ish; the Cyan option worked better then the Blue. If you have ‘blues’ in your photo that you want to change then try both the Cyan and Blue percentages to see which ones work best for that image. Or use both ^_^
  

Using the Select Color Tool is not just for our photos. We can use it on our digi stash! Let’s say you love a paper but wished the flowers were pink instead of orange or that a particular shade of blue just wasn’t ‘blue’ enough for ya; using the Selective Color Tool can help in a lot of those situations! I’m going to show you an example using some papers from my Felis kit.

We’ll start out with the small square or the original pink and kraft

I’m want it to be purple and kraft. So I played with the settings like so.

I put all dials to 100% in the red pull down then…

In the Magenta option I set all the dials to 100% accept the yellow, that I set to -100%

Now my paper is purple and kraft. Or how about a pale green?

Dude…this tool is super neat-o and so simple to use! BUT….there are times when you want to change a specific color and you can’t really get it to look right because not matter what you do it changes other things as well. For example. Take a look at this paper from the same Felis kit. Here is piece of the the original paper.

Now let’s say I wanted to change the orange leaves green and leave everything else as-is. I run into the problem of changing ‘like’ colors.

When I turned the orange leaves to the green color I was looking for it also changes the pink design in some of the leaves to purple. This happens sometimes. Not a lot but it does happen. It seems to acure in more complex designs. But yeah, play with the settings and have fun pumping up those colors and changing your favorite papers to suit your needs! It’s really cool and I must say; the Selective Color Tool has become one of my favorite Photoshop tools!

I hope to see you tonight in the chat room! My chat starts @ 9pm EST! YAY!

Enjoy and until next time, Happy Scrappin’!

How to Make a Hybrid Holiday Banner

Carey here! I just love decorating for the Holidays, and lately I’ve been obsessed with banners. I want to share with you how to make an easy hybrid banner to spruce up your home for the Holidays.

You’ll need the following supplies:

• Christmas Magic kit by Karen Funk
• D-cuts Pendants + Banners kit by Deena Rutter
• Font: Rage
• 1 sheet of matte presentation paper or white 8 1/2 x 11″ cardstock
• scissors
• pop dot adhesive
• black distress ink
• black marker
• hole punch
• red eyelets
• eyelet setter
• ribbon/yarn
• Stickles (glitter glue)

Step 1: Open a new 8.5 x 11″ file.  Add three triangles to serve as clipping masks for the pendants. I rotated one to fit on the sheet of paper for ease of printing. Add three scalloped circles from the D-cuts Pendants + Banners kit. I’m going to use the word “JOY” so I only used three of each. If you want to use a different word, you may need an additional page for the extra pendants and circles.

Step 2: Add your desired papers from the Christmas Magic kit and clip to the shapes. Add glitter and snowflake banner to the pendants.

Step 3: Add red frames, positioning so they will fit on the page. Clip papers in the open space behind the frames.

Step 4: Type one letter centered in each frame. I used the font Rage in red. Since the “O” is not as ornate as the other letters, I placed the sparkle tree behind it.

Step 5: Print onto matte presentation paper or white cardstock and cut out the shapes. I left a thin white border around the red frames to preserve their detail.

Step 6: Ink the edges with black distress ink. For the tight areas, use a marker to carefully ink the edges.

Step 7: Punch holes in the top corners of the pendant and insert eyelets to reinforce the holes.

Step 8: Assemble pieces using pop dots to add dimension.

Step 9: Tie ribbon or yarn through the eyelets to assemble banner.

Step 10: Add Stickles (or other glitter glue) to red frame and letter. Set aside to dry.

Now your banner is ready to hang and enjoy!

Tutorial: Simple tips for beginning photo editing part: 1

Learning to digital scrapbook can be a daunting task when you first start out AND so can photo editing.  I cannot tell you how happy I was to just learn these simple skills in Photoshop Elements and what a huge difference they made in my digital scrapbooking layouts.

Lightening Photos: When your photo is underexposed, your falsh didn’t go off, or the flash was simple not enough light.

1.  Open a photo in PSE.

2.  Always make a copy of your original layer before modifying it. Then if you don’t like the way it’s turned out you can discard it and easily start again on another copy of the original. To create a new empty layer, click on the New Layer icon at the top left of the layers palette. A new layer will appear immediately above the layer you currently have active.

2. Go to Enhance> Adjust Lighting> Levels.

3. Your levels box will pop up. Click on the third little eyedropper all the way to the right (set white point)

4. Click on any portion of your photo that is white, or the lightest area you can find in your photo.

5. Your photo will now be brighter than the original–simple as that!

6. If you don’t like the changes to your photo you can always undo them and keep playing around with the lighting until you get the perfect look. Just press reset in the levels pop up box.  You can change the lighting by clicking on different white parts of your photo with the eye dropper.

Warming Photos: Used when the flash or other lighting washed out the colors or you just want to add a little warmth to the photo.

1. Open a photo in PSE.  Duplicate photo by going to Layer> Duplicate Layer> OK this will make a background copy.

2. Click on the “Create Adjustment Layer” icon that looks like a black and white circle next to the New Layer icon at the top of your Layers palette.

3. Choose “Photo Filter”

4. Be sure that you have the “Preview” option enabled by clicking the box, this will allow you to view the intensity as you increase/decrease the warmth.  Change the warmth by dragging the Density slide to the left or right inside the Photo filter pop up box.  You can also select the “warmth tone”  by changing the color box by clicking on it.  Nice colors to try when looking for warmth are yellow, orange, pinks, and reds.

5. The results: A warm sunny day!  I wanted to take the cool tones and bring some warmth into the photo. It was a really warm day, but my camera did not capture that, a few simple steps and it’s perfect!

Just a few reminders:

1. Work with a copy of your photo and be sure to save the edited photo under a different name in case you want to go back to the orginal .

2. Moderation in all things.  The slight, simple changes you make in photo editing are going to have the greatest overall impact and will keep your photos looking natural and “real”.

3. Have fun, the more you play around in Photoshop Elements the more comfortable you’ll feel.  Your photos and layouts will thank you!