I found my old blog; Scrap Your Life by Suzy. Wow I can't believe its been since 2007 since I have written in this blog (and my baby girl was so little!! She is till my baby even though she is 11 now!). Back in 2007 I was doing a lot of scrapbooking and digital scrapbooking, which I loved. I still love it but really can't find the time to do it. I had quite a few post on this old blog so I decided to tranfer the post to my new blog. Some of the pictures are gone but the info is still there. Who knows I might just get the scrapbooking bug again!!

How to Download a Digital Scrapbooking Freebie

Last weeks challenge involved downloading digital freebies. I had a few questions on how to do this. It is not very hard so I will do my best to explain it so bear with me if I totally confuse you. I am not to good at computer geek speak LOL! Here goes!
First thing find a free kit or element you want to download. Lots of digital designers offer free kits to help get people to buy their kits. Most kits are very reasonably priced and think of them as supplies that NEVER run out. Lots of designers offer freebies in their blogs too. One blog I like is Designs That Rawk!. She does awesome work & thanks so much for the freebies. One of her new freebies is Cora by Amanda Roberts. So go to her blog to find it.
Now click on Download 4 Share under the picture of the kit. Most downloads have an area that says download here or click on the kits picture to start to download.
Now when you click on the download link it will either take you to the area to download or it will open the box to download. For this kit it opens up the 4 Shared Free File Sharing site. Scroll down a bit and you will see Download File underlined click on that. You computers file download box will pop up. Now click on Save. The Save As box will pop up. Pick where you would like to save the file. I have a special folder just for my digital scrapbooking items and I download it into there. Click save and your download will start. Most downloads take between a few minutes to 30 or 40 minutes depending on the size of the file. This one will take my computer appx 20 minutes. It may take you less if you are on a high speed connection. I am just one step up from dial up so it takes me a little longer.
After you finish downloading the file go to the folder where you downloaded it and you will see a zip file there. Double click on the zip file, click extract all files and the extraction wizard will pop up. Click next and pick the place you would like to extract it to. I have folders for paper kit ect. Now click next again and it will extract the file to the place you would like it. After it is extracted I delete the zip file since I do not need it anymore and it help saves space on the computer. Now you can click on the folder and open it up and look at all the goodies.
When you use the freebies and publish it anywhere including your blog be sure to note the designers to pay them the credit they are due. These designers are very talented and to give their work away is so kind so give them the thanks they deserve. Also be sure to read the info that comes with the kit on how you can use the product.
WOW! Now if you are not thoroughly confused go get some freebies!! But don't blame me when you are a total addict like myself LOL!!
If I have you confused just ask me and I will try to help you out.
Here is a fab blog that is a great guide to freebies.
Scrapping with IkeaGoddess

Free Image & Photo Editing Software

As someone who loves to scrapbook I also love to learn to do new things to expand my scrapping horizons. So I have been starting to study up on digital scrapbooking. Digital scrapbooking can be quit involved or very easy depending on how much you want to do. So I started looking into photo editing software. There are a lot out there, ones such as PaintShop and PhotoShop are quit expensive and do a lot of things. Awhile back I tried a free 30 day download of PaintShop Pro. It is a nice program if I had a clue what I was doing (I didn't & 30 days was not enough time to learn). So I went on a quest to find some free programs to edit my photos and found some very nice programs. The first one I downloaded was PhotoPlus 6.0. This program is a pretty basic photo editing program that does quit a bit of things and is not as hard to learn as some of the big programs. Though all these programs do have some sort of learning curve and takes some time to figure out. What I do is just start playing around to see what I can do. The second program I downloaded was Gimp 2. This is a wonderful program very similar to Photo Shop. In fact I used some of the PhotoShop tutorials on the web to help me do some of my editing and found Gimp was set up very close to PhotoShop. I also bought a book on PhotoShop 7 at Hastings bookstores for $1.99. It has been a super help. This program is quickly becoming my favorite. It cam also support some of PhotoShop plug ins. I really like the fact that these are FREE and so far no nasty adware or spyware has popped up due to the downloads. So if you want to venture into more in depth digital scrapbooking I recommend trying out these programs. They are free so you have nothing to lose. Here are the links so you can check them out for yourself:

PhotoPlus 6.0

Gimp 2 Download
If you prefer to get a CD for you download you can find it here
Free Gimp CD
Here are some tutorials for the Gimp. See some of the fun things you can do to your photos.
Gimp Tutorials
More Gimp Tutorials
More Info Links for Gimp
Some tutorials for Photo Plus
PhotoPlus Tutorials
More PhotoPlus Tutorials
I hope you try these out and let us know how you liked them.

Digital Collection Addiction

As a scrapper I think we are prone to collecting things for scrapbooking. I almost love the collecting as much as I love to scrap. Digital scrapbooking "supplies" as you might say are VERY addicting because there are so many you can download for free. I have a wonderful collection all organized into categories. As a paper scrapper mostly I love to print out the paper and embellishments and use them on my paper pages. They are nice or nicer than store bought and free. It does take a little time to cut them out but not much. Sometimes I print them on paper made for labels and use them as stickers. I have joined some wonderful forms and am learning to digital scrapbook as I collect freebies. Here are a few of my favs:

3 Scrapateers

lauraskathi

Shabby Princess