When I Was One....

I don't do many scrap pages any more, but when my friend Charlie from Little Boy Blue Scraps put the gorgeous 'Blue Memories' kit up on her blog for FREE - I had to have a go! 

So here's my page - 'When I Was One!'

Thanks for looking!

Lisa xx

Long time no see lol!

Sorry I've been MIA for a little while - I've had a project or 6 that I've been working on, but had to keep a secret until now as the people they were a surprise for have my blog addy lol! So now they all have them - I can show you!

Some of you will know my Dad's been in hospital...and his nurses did such a good job that he wanted to give them a thank you gift! So he asked me to make each of them a bag, as some of them had seen the one I made my Mum for Mother's Day and said they liked it!

And here they are - all six of them lol! 

By all accounts they were very pleased with them, so yay! I'm glad I was able to do something nice for them after the great way they looked after my Dad!

Also, remember my post with the photoshopped Farbenmix Vida dress? Well, I finally got it made! Yay me! 

Here it is.....I'm so happy with it - I think it's the most ambitious single item I've made since I started sewing!

The back of the dress....

 and the front! 

I think I'm going to have a weekend off now lol! 

Thanks for looking, hope you have a great long weekend! 

xxx

'Planning fabric choices in Photoshop' - tutorial.

I had this lightbulb moment yesterday, and have been asked to share with you how I do it, so here goes!
(To see the images full size, just click on them).

1. Take a photo of your pattern picture, and the upload it into photoshop. I resize mine to 600x400 just for ease of use and file sizes! This will be referred to here as 'Background layer'.

2. Create a new layer (layer>new in menu bar) - this will be referred to here as 'Layer 1'.

3. Make sure your brush tool is set to 100% hardness and around 3 pixels (if you're using 600x400 image), then using your PEN tool, draw around one section of the pattern. Then right click>stroke path. When the pop up box appears, make sure it's set to brush, and if the little box is checked underneath that, uncheck it. Click OK. Then right click>delete path. Repeat for each section, and it should now look like this - 

4. Hide the Background layer (click the little 'eye' next to the layer in the layers palette), and you'll be left with this...

5. Either drag-and-drop or use right click>place to add a fabric pic. Place this layer BEHIND (or below) Layer 1 in the layers palette. Then right click>rasterize layer.

6. Click on Layer 1 in the layers palette so it is highlighted, then using your magic wand tool, click on the section of pattern you want to add the fabric to. You will get a marching ants outline. 

7. Click your fabric layer in the layers palette to highlight it, then go to Select>Inverse in the menu bar, then press Delete on your keyboard.

This is what you should get...

8. Repeat with different fabric layers for different parts of the pattern until you're happy with the result!

9. Finally, show the Background layer by reclicking the eye icon, and hide Layer 1 by clicking the eye next to that layer, and you're done!

***If you already have a black and white line drawing on your pattern (lucky you!) you can skip steps 2-4, add your fabric layer ON TOP of your background rather than underneath, and just proceed from there, treating your background layer as LAYER 1 above.

Hope that makes sense! 

Thanks for looking

Lisa

xxx

Using Photoshop to plan fabric choices!

This was kind of a lightbulb moment for me this afternoon.....so I thought I'd share! Those of you who sew and have Photoshop have probably been doing this for years, but I've only just caught on (I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, if you hadn't already guessed! Ha ha!).

In the post below you'll see I bought a Farbenmix Vida pattern, and I was trying to plan in my head what fabrics I had and what to put where, when I suddenly had a brainwave - why not Photoshop it?

So I took photos of the fabrics, and a photo of the line drawing on the front of the pattern, et voila! Instant (relatively!) dress right there on the screen!

I think I'll be doing this now for all my patterns!

Thanks for looking!

Lisa xxx

Playing with photoshop...

The more I looked at my blog recently, the more I decided I didn't like the frames I made for my photos - too fussy!

So this morning while Russ was asleep and Jamie was playing (relatively!) quietly with his trains, I thought I'd have a play and see if I could come up with something I liked better!

So here it is....this photo is one of the set I took when I made Jamie's contrast hoodie. This was towards the end of the mini shoot - I think you can tell lol!

So, what do you think - better? 

Thanks for looking!

xxx