Almost, almost…. but not quite yet.

It’s almost Thanksgiving, the real most wonderful time of the year. I get to see family and eat a ton and a half. Most importantly… I don’t have to buy anyone anything to do it!

Yay!

I’ve actually already had two other Thanksgivings (basically) so far. I have a feeling by next week that I am going to be so turkey-ed out. As of now, I’m not… we’re even having turkey and dumplings for dinner tonight to kill off the rest of the leftover turkey from Saturday.

Saturday’s Thanksgiving with my brothers, my older brother’s roommate, and their friend.

I’ve been referring to it as the Bachelor Thanksgiving. And I promise, my living room is clean, it’s just that taking pictures facing my cluttered desk, bookshelf, and craft table is never a good idea.

Last night we went to the church’s annual Thanksgiving dinner with my sister and step-father.

Today Ryan, Bella, and I have been getting our paper scrapbooking craftiness on. I’ve finally gotten together the Christmasy stuff for my Document December prep (and a few other basics – you know seeing as how I usually use my computer for scrapbooking) so this morning I sat down to start. Yes, I know, it’s not December yet, but I’ve been told getting your stuff together early helps with actually keeping up with it, so I’m trying. (Me actually trying this again is also her fault, so if I fail again it is indirectly her fault as well, lol) As I did my prep work Bella and Ryan made their own scrapbook pages with some other paper scrapbooking stuff I found laying about the house. For some reason people keep buying me it…

No, I’m not sharing my progress on mine yet. When/If I ever finish all the base pages I’ll share it. But start looking for this one posts about it:

Saturday Scrapbooking

First since I haven’t done this in a while… well, yeah I’m not posting all those other pages you missed. Look on Scrap Stacks, I’ve put them there, along with my gallery at My Scrapbook Art.

Here’s a round up of my DSD pages…
(if you don’t know what DSD is then your probably don’t do digital scrapbooking thus you wouldn’t really care to know what DSD stands for.)

(all of those be clickable)

And this week’s releases:

Traci Reed has a collaboration with Shawna Clingermann and the most precious solo kit ever.

Right now I’m guesting with Studio Basic and she had two collaborations come out this week.

I got on Darcy Baldwin’s team during DSD, and she had a font collaboration come out this week.

(I used it on all of the above.)

And lastly, the page I made for the Scrap Stacks Stack-Lift challenge, I lifted this page by the awesome Amy Martin.

Hey, you want to get this month’s free template?

Then make sure you go and stop by the My Scrapbook Art blog because I posted it over there today!

Not that Wordless Wednesday

Photo editing with me style.

Original – What can I say… I love me some sunburst back-lit pictures.

Here is the original next to the final version, and then, it next to the final black and white version.

Now… let’s get to step showing.

1. Open a curves layer and edit first going to your red channel, then green, then blue. Once those are done go to RGB channel and select the black line and do any more tweaking you wish.

2. Take that layer and change the blend mode to soft light at 70% opacity.

3. Create a gradient layer going at a diagonal of about –30 degrees. Make your firs color a dark brown and your second a good strong orange. Turn the brown’s opacity down to about 25%.

4. Turn your gradient layer’s blend mode to linear burn with an opacity of about 20%.

5. Do a slight bump to both your brightness and contrast.

6. Create an exposure layer. Nudge your Offset and Gamma Correction until you get just a touch of a hazy effect to your photo.

7. Duplicate your background and select all your editing layers. Merge. Then if you want run a noise corrector. I ran Noiseware and used the Landscape preset.

(I know mine looks like I skipped the last step…. I didn’t. *sigh* I’ll explain at the end why some things don’t look the same from one step to another in layer set up…)

8. Duplicate your merged layer and go to Smart Sharpen. I increased it until details were crisp and mostly overlooked any noise being added, that will be taken care of next.

9. On your sharpness layer create a mid-dark gray layer mask then take a soft white brush and go over things you want to bring more detail to. I went around the edges of her, the stitch detail on her shirt, her features, and the camera. And that’s it for this part!

Now… the black and white conversion.

10. Change your image mode to Grayscale.

11. Then go and change it again to Duotone. Pick your colors (even if you just use black and white… or a very dreamy pink and purple, lol…. or a classy super dark brown and pale pale cream) then click on the curves for each and adjust until your happy.

Now… I can’t tell you how many times I almost gave up on this post!!! Photoshop was literally crashing every other blessed step. But I trudged on, saving a TIFF of both my working image and of my screen shots so that I could post.

(linking up here, here, here, here, here, and here)

Howdy ho, November!

Things have been so crazy. The dump of things bothering me last time did help a lot, however, like I said, things have been not quite normal in these here parts.

For starters, from the week of Halloween until last week Zach was sick. Turned out he had a sinus infection and a really bad ear infection, and to make it even better, he has apparently developed an immunity to the antibiotics that we found that finally worked on him (he stayed on antibiotics for one thing or another up until about the age of three) so we spent several days wasting time on something not working. Most days during this time we were lucky to get his fever down to 100. And Zach is the most annoying sick child ever. He’s like a combination of 4 year old hyper boy and pre-pubescent PMS-ing girl child. I was so glad to see him go back to school last Friday.

However, I did get a somewhat great group shot at the end of last month of all four kidlets. Of course my always happy smiley baby is always crying screaming baby in group pictures. I have made my peace with this – ok… not really, but I’ll live.

I did get a great rare shot of the three bigs at play together.

Yes, this post is a bit of a photo dump – you will make peace with this like how I’m making peace with Mason’s crying group picture self.

I made, earlier this year in like the beginning of summer, to get more pictures of me. I kinda got used to there being more pictures of me when I did my tummy pictures weekly while pregnant with Mason, and honestly, I kind of like it. Yeah I take them in front of my bathroom mirror like a teeny-bopper girl getting a Facebook photo, you can shut up.

And yes, I am also trying to use black and white more. In case you didn’t know – I hate my photos in black and white. I think other people have lovely black and white photos, mine look like a gray nasty mess in my mind.

The obligatory cute Bella photo:

That shirt she is wearing – cutest freaking spending of $3 ever. Thank you consignment stores.

I’ve also been working on mastering low light pictures on my camera. I’m determined to get this down. I’ve had this camera three years now and while I do desperately want the Nikon 1, I really do also love my camera, and I know John really desperately does not want to buy me a new one. So, I’m trying. My flash sucks. Really, really sucks. That means I try never to use it, which leads to many missed or messed up low light photo opportunities. Thankfully my children are great sports at letting me practice with them.

Now, these three are from Saturday.
First, you get Bella posing Mason. She loves to take pictures with our kid camera. It’s so cute. You see her posing him, and you see the picture she just got of him. After is the self-portrait she took with my camera with Mason – another thing she loves to do. This is a rare awesome one. John wants it printed and framed and hung in our room. Lastly, one I took, my boy is trying to master standing on his own. He can do it for a few seconds, and he spends most of his time standing with one hand just barely resting on a surface.

Lastly, (no pictures included) if you’ve been wondering about the monthly free template, you can find last month’s – and soon this month’s – over at The My Scrapbook Art blog where I now host monthly template challenges. Hopefully next month I’ll have the time to make up two so I can have one for here and there.

On my way to finding the happy place.

Yesterday I wasn’t fully honest.
((Don’t worry I’m still not depressed.))

It’s not just that I’m tired that has put me in a cranky-pants mood.
I’m a stewer, that’s what has put me in a cranky-pants mood.

stewer – (n.) \stü-ər/ – one who does not move past crap; one who dwells on stupid stuff; one who needs to grow up.

NORMALLY…
Normally, I am not a stewer. Normally, I get mad (including yelling, venting, and maybe throwing a thing or two), and then I get over it. That’s me normally. I am not built to bottle up my rage. When I’m angry, generally we all know it, and we all know why. HOWEVER, there have been two things that I just haven’t been able to vent about and they are eating me up.

So I’ve decided screw it. I’m venting about them.

As you might - or might not - have noticed, I’m no longer working on The Lilypad’s creative team. It was not an easy decision to make, nor is it one that I’m not constantly second guessing. The Lilypad was my happy little digital scrapbooking home, and I loved it. (Don’t get me wrong, I still love the place and the designers and the community.) Not being a Polly is well, awkward. I don’t really want to be active or anything because I don’t want to draw attention to the fact that it no longer says Polly under my name. Because then I’ll have to answer the question of “WHY?” and honestly, that’s not really a question I’m happy answering.
Not talking about my leaving the team is probably the number one thing keeping me in this bad mood. It’s like this living, breathing thing inside of me that only needs the slightest provocation to be a roaring monster. It’s made me paranoid about some of the people I worked with because any slight over there now makes me wonder “Is this on purpose?” because I don’t know what’s been said about it – if anything even has. Which is just stupid. This is not the type of person I am, nor is it the type of people that the other people of The Lilypad are. They’re NICE people. And I am not a pessimist. Nor am I generally a paranoid fool. Yet, every time someone has noticed my non-Polly status and asked about it I become a paranoid-pessimist all over again… and it lasts for DAYS. This is not acceptable any longer, so here we go.

I chose to step down as a Polly. I wasn’t kicked off the team.
I was asked to please reconsider, but by the time that I decided to do it, well, I was still working through my feelings on the whole situation that led up to my decision. The situation? Well, we can just sum it up as a misunderstanding coupled with wounded pride. As I stated above though, I still love The Lilypad, and I really hope my awkward feelings pass soon because it is one of the best places to be as a digital scrapbooker, and those awkward feelings – THOSE ARE ALL ON ME. And I miss feeling like I’m at home.

The other situation, well, it doesn’t require nearly as much explanation.
The Parents Day Out program that I am working at is shutting down in January 2013. Our church is having some money issues and the program isn’t even breaking even with operating costs. Since I love my church, and want to see it doing well, I understand and support their decision. But I’m still sad about it because I absolutely love my job.

There.
I’m already feeling a little better and lighter.

I’m not depressed. (Hello again!)

I’m just so darn tired ALL. THE. TIME.
And I don’t feel like blogging the same things every day right now.
“….Mason is teething, oh and not sleeping either…”
”….Bella is being obnoxious and bratty today…”
”….I’m sick… my body hurts… my head hurts…”
”….Ryan has the mistaken idea that he can fly…”
”….Zach is pms-ing, why can’t he be girl and just do this once a month?…”

That’s not to even start covering all of the sleep deprived arguments and blow ups over stupid and silly crap between John and I.

To top it, when I’m NOT in a bad mood I’m generally too busy catching up on all the crap I didn’t do when I was in a bad mood to get on here and blog.