Creative Questions...

I had a couple questions from this post that I put up on Saturday so I'll see what I can answer here. Some of my answers may still not explain very much, but I'll try. :-)

Lauren asked about the photo of the girls and how I did the photo effect. Let's just start with the fact that I am no digital photography expert. I am, however, and expert in clicking something in my photo program to try and then hitting undo if it doesn't look good. :-) That said, I use Adobe Photoshop Elements to play/correct/mess with my photos. Using that program I opened the picture up and first changed the picture color to sepia. Then I searched around in the different pre-made frame options in the program and picked a "rough masks" so the edged look all swishy and messy.

Lu asked about ideas ... I find them all over the place, but here are some of my recent favorites:

• Rebecca Cooper's book: Real.Life.Scrapbooking. It is excellent. She's a stay-at-home-mom who just wants to encourage folks with limited budget, time and energy to keep scrapbooking. Her pages are simple and beautiful. My layout of the girls was my own creation, but I have to say that I tried to pattern just the simplicity of her layouts.
• The inspiration for the baby announcement also was from Rebecca Cooper (she's a favorite blogger and scrapper of mine, can you tell?) :-) I tried to find her original announcement on her blog, but struck out or I'd post a link to her original creation. Then I just copied the same style for the baby shower invitation that I was working on, changing the style and text.
• For cards and invitations that I make for others, I get a lot of ideas from this magazine: Paper Crafts. I tend to simplify a LOT of their project because I just don't have the supplies that their designers have, and the friends that I design stuff for usually can't afford to pay what it would cost me in just supplies to make some of them. However, it is GREAT for inspiration.

That's just a start. Maybe I'll post more inspiration links in the future. Right now, it's time for some lunch round these parts. :-)