It's a Creative World

Transferring photos to fabric

I have recently finished this little journal for my daughter. It is for her photography ideas and inspirations and she requested some vintage photographs for the cover. It was a good inspiration for me as I have been wanting to try out this technique for a while now. Using an eco friendly orange household cleaner called Citra Solv, it is possible to transfer a toner ink based photocopy or print onto fabric and it will become permanent! Yes, permanent! 

I was really excited to try this for the first time. I'll give the short version here, but if you want more detail there are some helpful instructions here.

I used a scrap of cotton curtain lining which had a nice smooth feel and a tight weave. Using masking tape, I stuck - print side down- the toner print I wanted to use. (Remember to reverse your image before you print it- especially if you are using some text in your image.) I'm used a collage of old family photos for my first experiment.

 Underneath the fabric I placed a piece of cardboard and underneath that a few layers of fabric just to provide a little "give". 

The paper I used was the cheapest kind of printer paper you can buy -  I think mine came from Asdas.

Be sure not to have any masking tape over the area where your image is.

I used a pin to pierce a couple of holes in the foil on the top of the Citra Solv bottle and then poured a small amount into an old plastic lid. Using a flat natural bristled paint brush I brushed over the back of the paper using only just enough liquid to wet the paper but not oversaturate it. Once you do this you will be able to see right through the paper to your image.

Using the back of a tablespoon, I rubbed hard all over the image. Perhaps I could have rubbed even harder as my image didn't turn out quite as strong as I expected. I think another factor in this was that all my photos were quite small and perhaps a larger image would come out clearer. You will definitely lose some detail however you do it, but I love the aged vintage effect anyway so I didn't mind at all...

...and here is how it turned out.  I was quite pleased with the technique and will surely be using this again for many things ; homemade journals, pillows, sachets....wherever the inspiration takes me! The Citra Solv is not cheap, but a little goes a long way. Use it sparingly. It smells wonderful and is also super for removing stains and general household cleaning. I bought 4 little 8oz bottles all for craft use and am now down to my last one as I used the other 3 for cleaning. I am telling you...once you have smelt the stuff, you'll be hooked! 

I wonder if you'll give this a try...let me know if you do :-)

Have fun being creative !

Doda

 

 

Learn by my mistakes

I realise I risk stating the obvious with this post, but it is something I feel really strongly about, based on my experiences over the past few weeks and have to flag it up again.

So many of us love scrapbooking and, for me, it is the perfect hobby. It combines my love of photography, my love of recording tiny details and having each ‘memory’ captured and my need to try and be artistic.

I am proud to call myself a scrapbooker and have been proud to do so for the past 8 years. I buy my acid free paper, my acid free scrapbook albums, my acid free glues and embellishment. I am a scrapbooker. I know what acid does. I avoid it when I am scrapping.

Why then have I made such errors of judgement?

I have ruined so many of my photos needlessly and thoughtlessly and I want to urge you all to resist the mistakes I have made. I HOPE I am preaching to the converted really and that you have shown way more common sense than I clearly have. Plus, many of you will be younger than me and so even if you have made the same errors they might not be quite so bad.

For the past couple of weeks I have been working to try and save as many of my old photos as possible. I am from an era where photos were carefully mounted in the sticky photo albums with very non-acid free glue and covered with totally non-acid free plastic film. They were, in effect, being put in a storage system designed to destroy them very quickly. And destroy them they did.

 

My childhood pictures are, by and large, OK as they were stored in their original photo packets. That is apart from the ones that I chose as ‘ the best ones’ when I was in my 20s and put in brand new shiny corrosive sticky albums. I pretty much ruined those. My teen photos from the 70’s and 80’s are pretty much ruined. They have discoloured, have stuck rigidly to the backing to the extent many cannot be removed and, when I do get them out, they are coated with the glue on the back and curled beyond belief.

 

I even put recent pictures in albums when I should have known better.

All photographs may deteriorate over time. Treasured black and white images take on stains and spotting. Color prints yellow and crack with age. Old Polaroid snapshots fade. Home-printed digital images become murky in just a few months. Proper photo storage using acid-free paper and cardboard products can extend the life of precious photos by reducing the deterioration that comes with time.

Archivists recommend storing photos in acid-free paper or plastic sleeves which are laid flat in boxes also made from an acid-free material. If photo albums are preferred, they should be manufactured from materials that are safe for long-term storage of photographs.

Acidity is measured by pH, a scientific formula that ranges from 0 to 14 with a pH of 7 considered neutral. Pure distilled water is considered neutral. A pH of less than 7 is acidic and a pH higher than 7 is called alkaline or basic. For example, battery acid has a pH of 0 and vinegar's pH is 3. On the other side of the scale, milk of magnesia has a pH near 11. Acid-free paper and storage products are treated with a buffering agent to neutralize the processing and naturally occurring acids. The resulting products have a neutral pH ranging from 7 to 9.5 and won't damage photographs during storage. Museums, libraries and universities have successfully used acid-free products to protect historical documents as well as photographic images

I have now removed all of my photos from their albums. I can’t believe we had some 40 albums to sort through. The photos are now all labelled, categorised and in storage boxes until I work my way through all of them.

 

I am scanning all of them, so I have digital back ups of the images. I am then either scrapping with the originals or, if they are too badly damaged and discoloured and faded, enhancing them in a photo program and then scrapping digital prints of them.

 It is possible to restore the pictures, but it is time consuming. I am no expert and if you have really special photos then you may need to get expert help to restore them properly. An expert could get far better results than these.

Below are some examples - and these were by no means the worst examples i have. I have some that are so spoilt there is no repairing them.

 

 

 
 

and even one from the mid 1980s so discoloured after what is a relatively short time in a bad environment.

 

So, don’t make the mistake I did. Get your photos OUT of those albums before it is too late.

 

Canvas fun

Hi everyone - Dolly here

I saw these three canvases ages and ages ago in Dunhelm Mill. The packaging had been torn and the canvases were a little grubby in places – though fortunately not where it mattered. I loved the colours, which I thought would be perfect for making a picture of one of our favourite places for a holiday – the Caribbean beach resort at Disney.

 
I loved the fact the canvases had really lush embroidery on and beads at the centre of the flowers.

 

I like pictures that are in threes so the whole set was ripe for decorating.

 I selected the two pictures I wanted to use and cropped and resized them in PSE. I also applied a texture filter to them as I wanted a very faded washed out canvas feel to them.

 

I then printed the pictures off on A4 Epson Archival Matt Cardstock.

I measured them and cut them into strips and then glues them on to the two outside canvases.

 
 

I left the centre canvas blank and added some American Crafts letters.

 

I had planned to put them in the bedroom, but in the end they finished up on my office wall – and they act as a daily reminder of why I work … to earn the money so I can enjoy the paradise!

 

Using 'white space' creatively

Hi Dolly here again.

A very quick and simple idea for today; it works equally well with digital scrapping and with paper and glue.

Do you ever have a photo that you really love but that has a lot of white space? Sometimes it is fine to cut that dead space off by cropping the picture really closely, but at other times the space is an integral part of the photo and you don’t want to loose it. But as a design concept it just doesn’t look great.

Text is the answer!

I had this fab photo of Nigel on our recent trip to death valley. I wanted it to show how tiny he was in comparison to the huge space we were in, but it didn’t make for the most exciting page.

I left all of the ‘space’ in rather than crop it, and then used text over it to break up the emptiness whilst still keeping it visible.

 
Here is another example where I have added the text in the 'dead space' onto the photo before printing it out and making a paper page.

 and another example of the same - and this could easily be done with things stuck onto the photo rather than just printed on to it.

 

Next time you are going to crop a picture tightly, think again. See what you can do to liven up that white space.

Scrap it BIG!

Hi all, Michelle here with my monthly contribution to this fabulous blog!

Sometimes when we scrap I think we get stuck with the same familiar photo sizes like 6’’ x 4’’ and 7’’ x 5’’. They’re easy to print and they fit nicely on a page but sometimes I like to mix it up and go BIG! Have you ever printed a photo out at A4 to use on a page and let the photo do the talking? It’s an interesting exercise to let the photo dominate and that’s what I did for this post.

  
The photo is of the lovely beach and ship inn at Saltburn, as the title suggests! My mum took it and it sure does make me home sick so I wanted the photo to do the talking for me and kept the rest of the page relatively simple.

 
I printed the photo off at A4 and made sure I ticked the borderless option in my print preferences so I could get the maximum size possible. You can see how wide it is on the 12 x 12. I trimmed about 1cm from the top of the photo just to make it ‘sit’ right on the page, in effect making it a longer picture rather than wider, and also buying me space for my embellishments so they would be in a good position and not look like they were falling off the page.

 
I picked out some 12 x 12 paper in a sandy beach colour as the base of my layout (Cosmo Cricket snorkel) and then collected together some contrasting papers to pick out the blues and beiges in the photo (Basic grey and Rose Moka) I cut the various papers with my trusty Purple cows freestyle mouse cutter and a decorative blade in wavy shapes to echo the waves of the sea and a sandy beach all at the same time.

 
I decided to position the large photo with an even thin margin round the top and sides. I felt the paper framed the photo well. I layered up the ‘waves’ overlapping them as I went, and I really like that they reach the edges of the base paper and are wider than the photo as I think it creates an optical illusion and makes it look like the photo is the full 12 x 12 width.

 
In the gap remaining at the bottom I added some wide vintage lace and a strip of blue ribbon to break up the line of the last bit of blue paper and then added some extra texture with some pom pom ribbon (my latest favourite embellishment!) I left the inner edge of the lace rough too to lend to the ‘washed up on the seashore’ feel

 
Then I filled the left hand side of the gap with my title alphas (We R Memory keeper’s chipboard alphas and Rose Moka tiny alphas) I made sure the chip alphas overlapped the last bit of blue paper, again to break up the line and also made sure it overlapped the lace to pull everything together.

 
And finally I added some shells to complete the seashore theme.

I really love the look of the BIG photo on this page, to me it invokes the memories I have of Saltburn and I can almost smell the sea!

Sometimes a photo just begs to be scrapped BIG like this one of my hubby

 
The photo printed at A4 and cut out. Made with Glitz Detour papers

 And this one of a fun day out with my sister and nieces

 
The Ferris wheel almost become the background paper alongside the Glitz Maya papers and then letting the small photos tell the story. (step by step instructions for this layout are on my blog here)

So why not have a go at scrapping BIG and letting your photos do the talking! I hope you feel inspired to have a play, as ever thanks for stopping by and until the simple things project post JOYfully comes around on the 18th, Happy Crafting

Love

MJM x

Do you want to know a secret?

a post full of not very well kept secrets.

Secret 1

I am quite old now! And that means photos of when I was younger have been years in sticky photo albums and are really in pretty poor condition. They are faded and the colours all gone haywire.

 Secret 2

I cheat when I scrap old pictures to make them look better.

 

 
I wanted to scrap these two pictures for part of my 5210 project (for details on 5210 project which is a free year long class check here) but they were not in great condition. I prised them out of the sticky album and scanned them but the colours were dreadful on the one of me on my own. (Oh and there is Secret 3 – I had a podgy tummy which I hid even then!)

I tried altering the colours in Photoshop but to make me look a normal tanned colour rather than looking like had serious jaundice (I really am always very tanned) it made the background go completely weird with the sea and sky developing a pink hue that was just plain odd.

As the main focus of the picture was to be me, it seemed sensible to alter the picture in photoshop by making me the right colour and then the background black and white.  The instructions here are for PSE 5 but I am sure it is similar in other versions and programmes and there are such good tutorials on the internet anyway (far better than this)

This is really simple to do by creating an adjustment layer.

First get the part of the picture that you want in colour adjusted to be the colour you want it.

 

 

Then select adjustment layer by clicking on the button (looks like a circle half black and half white)

Working on the adjustment layer only reduce the saturation down to zero so it all looks black and white.

 

Make sure the brush colours are the default of black and white (D ensures this and x toggles between the black and white)

 

Select the eraser tool and white and erase the black and white from the area you want to be coloured. So in this case I erased all over myself revealing the colour underneath. I tend to use a large brush size for most of it and reduce to a smaller size to do the edges and small details. If you accidentally erase something you didn’t mean to simple change to the black and go over it again and voila – black and white again.

 

Once you are happy with the finished picture crop and save as a JPEG which will merge the layers. Really simple and very effective for old ruined pictures as well as creating cool effects for other things.

 Secret 4 – cheat and make them look like old polaroids by adding a frame and text onto it. (I used to love old polaroids)

 Finally, make the page a real secret .Secret 5 – hide the journaling under the pictures by creating lift up flaps

 

  

Photo Overlays (with free downloads)...

Hi, Mandy here,

I'm no expert at digi, but do enjoy 'playing' in Photoshop Elements.  I like the look of photo overlays so had a play and made my own (downloads at the end of the post). 

If you're familiar with paper scrapping and have used a transparency, well, a digital overlay is a bit like using a printed transparency in paper scrapping.  Imagine 'Hambly' or 'Fancy Pants' overlays that you literally layer on top of your photo and can see the photo below. However, to use overlays in digi you do need software that allows layers.  I use Photoshop Elements 5, which is what I used to make the free downloads.  It's worth saying that before I went out and bought PSE, I used the free trial download off the web, to see if I'd get enough use out of it.  I can say that it was not a waste of a penny. 

Here's a photo straight out of the camera of my son M, playing football on the trampoline ( I was leaning out the bathroom window to capture him unawares)...

 

Now, here's the same photo which has been cropped and has an overlay ontop...

 

Similarly my other son R, taken on the same day...

 

 Now, cropped with a black overlay...

 

If you are familiar with using 'layers', then digital overlays are really easy to use.  Just open your photo and crop the part of the image you want to 6" by 4".  Then drag & drop the overlay onto your photo.  Decide if you like how it looks and then flatten the image so the overlay becomes 'glued down' on to the photo.  At this point I save the photo again as a jpeg.  You can re-size the downloads below but 6" by 4" is the size they come in.

I really like the effect and am much more likely to scrap the second version of each photo.

Below, I have included downloads for the two overlays shown in this post, aswell as a blank white and a blank black overlay for you to add your own text.

Download Ball skills black overlay

Download Football crazy white overlay

Download White overlay no text

Download Black overlay no text

Don't be afraid to 'play' with digital.  It's a lot of fun.

Here at IACW we love to see what folks make with our downloads, so don't be shy, leave a link and let us see what you made.

Bye,

Mandy. 

Focus on colour in black and white

.. does that make sense? maybe not but maybe this will help ...

 
A very happy Birthday

Hi all! Michelle here with my little project for my corner of this fabuously creative blog. It was my birthday last month and hubby did very well planning a picnic by the river in Stratford-upon-Avon. We had such a lovely afternoon shopping and eating, all washed down with some pink fizz :)

 
This picture was taken by a lovely lady, a random stranger passing who offered to take our picture and I love it, it sums up a lovely memory and really has captured a moment in time. I wanted to scrap it but while I love seeing the river and the boat, the detritus of the picnic is not so attractive ... the solution was to turn the photo black and white but to keep our little family group in the centre in colour.

 
I used my word programme to do this, nothing fancy!! I inserted my photo into a document twice at exactly the same size

 
then turned the top one to black and white with the recolour tab

 
the bottom one I selected the crop option and cropped the photo down to the section I wanted to keep in colour

 
By using the wrap feature and selecting the colour section to be in front I could lay it onto the black and white photo to see how it would look.

 
Once I was happy I printed the document, and cut out the photos with a thin white border. to accentuate the colour section I then matted it onto a yellow paper leaving a very thin, distressed border.

 
I then adhered the colour section onto the black and white photo on foam pads for added dimension. You need to get right over the top of the picture when doing this and pick something to line up your pieces, in this instance I used the line of the river.

 
I then adhered some layers of ripped and distressed papers across a white 12 x12, the papers are cosmo cricket DeLovely collection and I think they are just that!

 
I built up the layout with some DeLovely ready steady chip pieces, stickers and title blocks

 
And used some Rose Moka teeny alphas and Glitz Plum crazy alpha stickers to finish it off.

And there it is a happy memory of a very happy day and a photograph that records everything about the day but focuses on the family picture. Why not give it a try, a picture doesn't have to be technically perfect to scrapbook with it and it doesn't have to be put through fancy graphic packages to repair it. In my opinion the perfect photo is the one that makes you smile and makes you re live the memory!

Thanks for stopping by and I'll see you soon alongside the other talented creative girls in our simple things post on Saturday, until then Happy Crafting

Love

M x

Scrapping Hipstamatic Prints

It's Kel again, and I've been scrapping for the first time in ages. It's always such a relief to get back to it.

A few years ago, there seemed to be a real boom in digital imagery - DSLR cameras were now priced within the reach of hobbyists and home editions of photo software were much better quality than in the past. On the back of that wave rose another, retro photography styles gained a cult following.

Hipstamatic. Lomo. Holga. Diana. Polaroid.

Many people are shooting film again, using unpredictable toy, vintage and reproduction cameras. People who shoot digital are using photoshop, other software and websites to vintage up their images. And the iphone has a huge group of retro-style photographers using a handful of very nifty apps. If the any of the words above are new to you, clicking on them will take you to a flickr gallery of images from that camera or app.

 

Whether you are playing with new images you have created, or bringing old family snaps to life, vintage colour photos pose several challenges. The colour is usually off, shifting towards yellows or blues. There can be a hazy dark border, called vignetting, around the edges. The subjects are often blurry and farther away than we are used to now.

 

Rather than avoiding these problems, we can embrace them. For many people, the colour shifting will cause the greatest problem. The simplest solution is to stick with neutral tones like the kraft above, but it is worth playing in your patterned paper and using the actual colours of your old photo like you would with any other. In the "Cooking in Japanese" layout, I tried patterned paper in the same greens and yellows as the colour shift in the photo, but the effect was a bit jaundiced and the photos didn't pop. In the end, peach paper proved the perfect background to those yellow-greens. 

 

The vignetting poses a problem if you try and crop the photos, so it is just best to enjoy it. I had to ink the edges to stop the cut edges glaring white. The vignetting also enhances that sense of distance, so common before zoom lenses were pocket sized. I feel that photos tend to work best in multiples, building up a picture in pieces - a horizon, part of a car and a family group conjure up that picnic all those years ago in a way that no single image from that day may be able to.

With a little imagination and attention to the special characteristics of retro photos, you can adapt almost any style of scrapping to integrate them. One thing I would like to try is using vintage pics alongside new, crisp and shiny ones - no idea whether that will work at all. 

If you've been scrapping pics like these, do leave us a linky and let us see!

xx

Ruby in Lola Land

Hi everyone, Carmen here :)

This project was inspired by the Copy+Paste birthday celebrations over on their blog. One of the challenges was to download some fabulous free printable sheets designed by Kirsty Neale & Julie Kirk and to come up with any project, using any medium and any of the images. Well, one look at the gorgeous sheets and my first thought was Charlie and Lola. I'm a huge fan of Lauren Child and luckily my youngest daughter Ruby is too. Her favorite doll, Lola, goes everywhere with her.

I browsed the internet and found the perfect image featuring Charlie and Lola around a sofa. There was even an empty seat like they were just waiting for Ruby to come and play.

I found a good photo of Ruby on my PC, it needed to be of her sitting and have no bits of head or legs chopped off. After a couple of attempts at resizing both the cartoon image and the Ruby image I found a scale I was happy with. I am no techie expert and just did this by inserting the two pictures into a Word doc and resizing them up and down till I was happy. I then printed them both onto photo paper making sure I selected the best quality option in my printer settings.

I cut out the picture of Ruby and attached her to the sofa with a couple of small dabs of Glossy Accent. The balloons, speech bubbles (which I turned into balloons), the party hat and the presents all came from the C+P download sheet. I arranged them on the scene until I was happy and attached those with small dabs of Glossy Accent too. I then went around the photo of Ruby and the other elements I had added with a sparkly black gel pen, not forgetting to add strings to the balloons and ribbons to Ruby's hair so that she fitted right into Lola's cartoon world.

Finally I covered the whole thing in a couple of layers of Glossy Accents.
I am so pleased with the end result. I'm thinking of making similar pictures as Christmas presents for my young nieces and nephews. I can see it being easily adapted to suit anyone's favorite character. In fact my two older girls have already demanded their own picture starring themselves too. This one, once spotted by Ruby was nearly squashed in a cuddle and kiss fest. Safe to say I am now looking for a frame so she can hang it in her room.

The copy+paste printable sheets are still available for download here.

Thank you so much for looking :)