Christmas Gift Box: Poinsettia & Music

Welcome Back

Today I’m sharing a little Gift Box I created using Serif Craft Artist. They have pre made templates that you can decorate and print out.

Poinsettia and Music Gift Box

The digikit I used to design this box’s embellishment is called ‘Season of Giving’ it is by Sahlin Studio and is my favorite because of its vintage styling. I like classic styles for Christmas.

If you have Serif Craft Artist in whichever format I highly recommend this digikit as I’ll be featuring more projects with elements designed with it in the coming weeks.

Links

• Season Of Giving Digikit on Daisy Trail website. You can buy the kit here, but you will need Craft Artist software to access the content. You can get a free trial version of the Craft Artist software from the Daisy Trail site too.

Best wishes and thanks for reading, see you soon

Billie

Read Full Post »

Floral Birthday Card

Welcome Back

Today I’d like to share a picture of a card I made using Serif’s Craft Artist programme.

Floral Birthday Card

I do like the versatility of the programme and that you can be just as creative as if you made the whole thing on your desk from the various elements.

With Craft Artist I chose papers, elements which I altered and duplicated so there is a lot of scope for adding your own mark to projects. When times are lean and budgets are too, digital kits are a fabulous way of making you pennies go further. They even offer a free trial of the software and some of the digikits are available for free. So trying it out doesn’t have to cost you anything but the download time.

Hope you give the programme a try, its amazing. I still love my inks and getting messy but I am also a fan of digital crafting like this too.

Best wishes and thanks for reading, see you soon

Billie

Read Full Post »

Tutorial: Birthday List with Craft Artist software

Welcome Back

For those of you who like to make New Years Resolutions, and those like me with bad memories. Perhaps you want a quick n easy way to remind you when birthdays are coming up. A short tutorial today, that is quick n simple to do but should help you to remember the birthdays of those you cherish.

Birthday List with Serif Craft Artist

You Will Need

• Computer
• Serif Craft Artist
• Digikit: Season of Giving
• 160 gsm card stock
• Printer

Method

• Open Craft Artist Program
• Go to Blank Projects and select your paper size, I wanted A6 so I went to the custom section and typed in the dimensions there.
• From the digikits choose: Season of Giving
• Add the ‘Gift log’ from the embellishment section of that kit, by doing a single click onto it, you could add the whole digi kit if you wish or just the specific items you want. Also add a material in the colour of your choice.

You will now see a blank page on the work area of Craft Artist, this is where you put the items you want to print. On the left of your screen, the items you added from your digikit will be in the tabbed sections marked; Backgrounds, embellishments etc.

• Drag the gift log picture from the embellishments tab area, on the left, onto your blank page. As you ‘drop’ the embellishment will stay on your page, you can move it around, or resize it, till it is where you would like it to appear.
• Next go to the materials section and bring over a piece of material. Click on the SCISSOR tool, then choose PUNCHES and the square punch to cut a narrow strip from the material. Place the strip of material over the words Gift Log and drag on the corners of the piece of material until it fits the area you want.
• Go to the TEXT tool at the top of the page, click it once, then click on your page, this activates the tool. If you go back to the top of the screen you can select from any font on your computer. Type the words ‘Birthday list’ on top of you material. When the text is selected like this, you can also drag the corners of the box around it, to resize the text larger or smaller. Move the text to where you would like it on the page by dragging it there using your mouse.
• Click save and then print onto your chosen cardstock.

You can create this project any size. The original is for you to list all the birthdays on one page. If you have lots of people to buy for, an alternative would be to make a separate page for each month. Like this one.

Birthday List with Serif Craft Artist.

Hope you can follow this tutorial ok and I’d love to see what you make, do leave me a link to your projects with your comments. If I can work out how to add pictures from screenshots, I’ll try to share more complex tutorials with Craft Artist.

Links

I highly recomend the Craft Artist Professional Program and the Photo Project software too. If you haven’t got the Craft Artist software yet, get in touch with Serif as I believe the PhotoProjects programe includes Craft Artist Professional and gives you even more tools.

• Serif Software
• Daisy Trail
• Craft Artist Professional
• Digikit: Season of Giving

There will be more projects from me using these programs, so if you want to join in, rush over to Daisy Trail and get some software and digi kits

Best wishes and thanks for reading, see you soon

Billie

Read Full Post »

Holiday Gift Bags 2011

Welcome Back

Today I’d like to share some pictures of gift bags that I recently made. This years Christmas card has a holly theme and I found the perfect gift bags in John Lewis BUT when I tried to order them online they had sold out of the size I needed. {sob}.  After a plea for help, my dear friend Lynn (Garden Pinks) pointed me to a tutorial that had printed gift bags. The tutorial was excellent but the bags themselves were not quite to my style, so as Tricia Morris would say, I made it my own, and here are the results.

Medium/Large Gift Bag. Christmas Holly 2011

From the tutorial I took the basic measurements and tried them out on paper, learned how it all went together then went to design some papers. Opened Craft Artist from Serif but in my own collection of digi kits I didn’t have any holly. Luckily my computer was online at the time, and after scrolling through lists of elements, I discovered that there was a digikit available that had THE most perfect holly. DH helped me download and install ‘Yuletide Joy’ digi kit and I put some papers and images together to make the bag.

After a play, I also worked out how to make a smaller gift bag from a single sheet of A4 card. I redesigned my layout to work in that format. I worked out where the scorelines would be so I could place my main image (holly) in the right place and in the later bags I’ve also added a seasonal greeting. LOVE LOVE the versatility of Craft Artist, there are plenty of projects that you can print out or just add background papers too. Once you get going though, the only limit really is your imagination.

Medium/Large and small Gift Bags. Christmas Holly 2011

Craft Artist is ideal for crafters of all levels and is really easy to use, great if you don’t have much room to craft in.

Not got Craft Artist yet? You so need it, if pennies are tight there is a free version of a cut down version of the software available and there are also some free digikits too. Treat yourself to a craft room on your computer, the embellishments and papers in the digikits are stunning, best of all you can use them over and over again, and you don’t need to find shelf space for all the stash

Links

• Daisy Trail
• Yuletide Joy

Really wish there was more light so I could film a video tutorial of how to make these. Autumn/winter in the UK though is very low light and I need very bright sunny day AND all the lights on to get something worth watching. Made lots of notes along the way, so there will be a video tutorial of this when the light allows.

Hope you like them and give Craft Artist a try, it’s so much fun.

Best wishes and thanks for reading

Billie

Read Full Post »

Review; Serif Digital Scrapbook Artist 2

Welcome Back

In today’s post I will be reviewing; Digital Scrapbook Artist 2

Serif; Digital Scrapbook Artist 2 and Daisy Trail 1

Product Details

• Serif; Digital Scrapbook Artist V2
• Item number
• RRP at time of writing:

Reason For Buying

I was lucky enough to receive this for Christmas last year. Although I like the idea of scrapbooking the cost of papers and embellishments and the fear of ‘getting it wrong’ has put me off. This software means I can play with designs and ideas, print them or save to disk the results.

How It Works

Digital Scrapbook Artist 2 is a program that you load onto your computer, it allows you to design and create scrapbook pages (or other paper projects) on your computer. You can print finished pages, save them to disk, or even upload them to share with others online.

To create projects, you choose a paper size and then open items from Digital Kits, to decorate your project. The digital kits contain, Background papers, embellishments, alphabets as well as layouts. To get started try using  the layouts, these are pre made scrapbook pages, you can just add your own photograph and your page is done.

The program comes with five digital kits, so you can play with the program as soon as it arrives. You can buy additional digital kits in packs of ten on CDs, or choose individual kits to download from Daisy Trail.

If you prefer a more hands on approach to your crafting, you can print out the background papers and elements and build your pages/projects in real life. Adding as much dimension as you like.

Not just scrapbooking! Don’t be put off by the title, you can choose your paper size, so you could make anything with this programme. How about cards, ATCs, recipe cards, baby’s first year books, art journal with these too. The possibilities of this software are just amazing!! It’s like the worlds best craft store!

Pros/Cons

Pros; Easy to use. Ok I admit when you first look at the screen the number of buttons puts you off but compared to Adobe Photoshop (with which I have a love/hate relationship). This is so much more user-friendly. It took me over a year to get my head around Photoshop, after one afternoon with this software, by the evening I had six finished pages!

Versatile and powerful. This has a lot of high-end features that the very expensive software has, at a much more affordable price.

There is an online community called Daisy Trail, which has lots of helpful people to inspire you with their pages and help you out if you get stuck. You can upload your pages to share them with the community and buy further digital kits.

Digital Kits are superb!  The best thing is you just drag and drop items onto your pages, if you want extra buttons you just drag them on! No more I can’t use this button coz it’s too nice and I know I can’t get anymore. You can have as many letters as you like, no more having to buy several sets of alphabets just to get a couple of extra letters. Once you have bought a digital kit you can combine any of the elements from it with any kit that you already have.

Build Quality

Fantastic, Serif have been making software for over 20 years. This program has elements from their other programs, they have put together a really user-friendly stable product.

Value for Money

Excellent!!!! The program itself comes with 5 digital kits, you can choose to buy collections of digital kits on CD for around £30 for ten digital kits, or cherry pick your favorite kits and buy them individually from Daisy Trail. The program is a wonderful investment for the endless supply of options for creative projects. The individual kits are really affordable if you can’t stretch to a whole CDs worth.

Would I buy it Again?

Totally! It has rapidly become one of my favorite crafting tools.

Summing up

Just try it!!! There is a free download of a trial of Digital Scrapbook Artist Compact available from Serif so you can see for yourself  just how cool this is. If you are not into scrapbooking this is also perfect for card making and any kind of paper crafting. If you just buy the kits for the papers, it’s still a good buy.

I was a sceptic too, but after a couple of afternoons with this software, I love it. If you don’t like downloading from the internet, you can buy many of the digital kits on CDs, from Serif.

Links

Serif

Digital Scrapbook Artist Software Buy the software from Serif and more product information. Check out the video, showing the features of the product.

Digital Scrapbook Artist Compact;  This is a cut down version of the full program to try for free.

Online support from Serif You can also download a manual from here too.

Daisy Trail Home of the online community of fans of the Digital Scrapbook Artist 2

Daisy Trail shop. Where to buy the Digital kits individually

Best wishes and thanks for reading, see you soon

Billie

Read Full Post »