Heavenly Crafts

Did you have a lovely Christmas and celebrate the New Year in style? We had a very quiet Christmas spent with the family, which was really lovely. At the moment, our eldest son and his girlfriend are here (but I think they go back today), middle son is home from Uni until next week sometime and daughter is away in Manchester visiting a friend. The boys are really disappointed not to have had more snow. We had about 2 mm last night and it has now frozen over so that walking from the house into my office (aka the garage!) is like walking on an ice rink, even though I only have to walk a few feet! And what's more, because we only had a little bit of snow, I haven't been able to take many photos as it disappeared so quickly, and I had a brand new camera for Christmas, something I have been wanting for absolutely ages!! David Bailey, watch out, because here I come!!!!

I've been practising with my camera (there are so many buttons and dials I only know what two of them are for!) and taken pictures of grass, snow, wood, plants, bricks as I am determined to get some decent textures to use in creating background papers. So watch out for those at some point in the future! But realistically, I won't get any designing time in this month as work is hectic. I have about 40 tax returns to do plus umpteen sets of accounts to go with them, so I have no free time at all.... :(.

I did squeeze in an hour yesterday though, and managed to create a desktop.

That way, you can either select the black mask or transparent mask area (you'll need to keep Ctrl pressed down to select it all). Then copy and paste your photo as a new layer above the mask area and clip it to the mask area (Layer>Create clipping mask). Alternatively, use the psd file. Feel free to download it here.

Happy scrapping! I'm off to do a VAT return now, exciting stuff, eh?!!!