Triune Blog Train - Father's Strength - FREE

It's that time again!  Another Blog Train is rolling out of the station!  This month the theme is for fathers, and includes some Christian references to our heavenly Father, too!  So, hop on board and enjoy the ride!  Just click on the preview for the 4Shared download of my portion.  Below the preview is a list of all the other stops along the way.  There may be a few other links later on.  If so, I will update this post.

Thanks for stopping by today!  Have a blessed day!

Participating Designer Links:

Cajun Diva Scraps

Triple J Designs

BlueCat

A-M Designs

Touched by a Butterfly

Scrappin' Sisters

4OSAi

Vicky Day Designs (YOU are HERE)

Thank You, Military Spouses!

I was made aware that today is Military Spouse Appreciation Day!  So, from the bottom of my heart, I want to say a BIG THANK YOU for the sacrifice that you and your family have made on behalf of my family in keeping us safe and free!  I totally understand that Freedom is NOT FREE!  I will never be able to repay those who have paid the ultimate cost of freedom in the sacrifice of their lives.

I'm not designing, but I do have an older kit that I would LOVE to share with you, especially those Military Spouses who love to scrapbook digitally.  But you could also print these papers and elements out for your paper scrapping, too!

You can click on the preview below for the 4Shared download.  You will need to click on the download button at 4Shared, which will take you to another screen for the 20 second wait when you click on that button.  After the 20 seconds, the download will begin automatically.

There is another freebie that a friend of mine (who is a military spouse) created with this kit.  It is a nice subway type of art piece specifically for military appreciation!  You will love it!  That preview is below the kit preview.  Click on it to go to her blog at 42 Shades of Pink.  Be sure and thank her!

Within the zipped download for this kit are the elements.  And then in separate folders you will find the papers and a frame cluster.  Hope you enjoy the kit!

Subway art created with "God Bless America" by Molly Bennett of 42 Shades of Pink:

Triune Blog Train Freebies

Hope your Monday is starting out/ending well, as the case may be!  :D  If not, I'm here to help cheer you up by giving you some goodies for your scrap stash!  We can ALL use more FREE stuff, right?!  :D

Welcome to the "Above Rubies" Blog Train!  This blog train is special to me because it is Christian themed!  However, that being said, most of the elements and papers will be useful in non-Christian themes, too!  AND, I even created a little surprise for the art journalers in the crowd!  Hope you like them!  Just click on the previews for the 4Shared downloads.  If you do not have a paid account with them (and I don't, either) then when you click the download button, you will be taken to another screen where you select the free download button and you will wait 20 seconds and then the download will begin automatically.

Please see the bottom of this post for the entire list of those who are participating in this train.  You will NOT be disappointed!  We are on different time zones, so if someone's is not up yet when you visit their blog, please return at a later time!

Thanks for stopping by today!  Blessings and Enjoy!

All papers and elements in both of these mini kits are at 300 ppi.  The papers are in JPG format and the elements are in transparent PNG format.  All shadows shown are for the purpose of seeing them better in the preview only and are not included on the element.

I also posted a couple of layouts I did using both mini kits.  Would love to hear your thoughts, especially on the art journaling kit.  If and when I return to the designing world, I will more than likely go in the artsy direction.  And, if you create a layout using these kits, I would LOVE for you to leave a link to your gallery so I could leave you some love!

And, for those of you who like to do art journaling, here's an extra portion for you!

Layout using Above Rubies mini:

Layout using Thou ART Blessed mini:

Blog Hop Participants:

Sairi Designs

A-M Digital Designs

Vicky Day Designs

Sugarbutt Designs

Touched By A Butterfly

Triple J Designs

Cajun Diva Scraps

4OSAi


BONUS STOP
Triune Blog Train on Facebook


If you lose your way, head back to the Train Station at Sairi's blog!

Charity Collab

Hello, my friends!  I wanted to let you know about a new charity collaboration kit that is on sale at Outside The Box Design Studio.  I have taken a sabbatical from designing, but did get involved with a Christian sister who has a heart for helping struggling women improve their situation in life, and has a blog dedicated to helping these women to succeed in improving their quality of life, One Step Away, International.  Susan is a digiscrapper and recently got into designing kits as a way of raising funds to donate towards this great cause.  Every penny made from these kits goes toward helping the struggling women who come across her path.  She sells under the designer name of "4OSAi" and the shop owner does not even charge her a commission for selling in her shop, but instead donates that normally expected charge to the charity!

Anyway, I said all of that to say that I offered to help Susan in the creation of the kits she put in the store.  Also, another Christian sister, Sylvie, is donating her time and talent to the collabs.  I think there have been other designers who have helped in this effort, too, in the past!  The new collab is my second "offering" but because I spend gray-headed days of forgetfulness lately, I didn't even think to post about the first "offering" I did!  So, I will introduce that one to you, too!  :D  Each preview is linked to the product in the OTBDS shop.

I pray these kits might tickle your art journaling (or otherwise) fancy enough to cause you to say, "I JUST GOTTA HAVE THAT!"  OSAi would be so grateful!

New Release (on sale for $4.80 for a short time), Building Dreams.  The kit includes 17 papers and 62 elements.  Hand painted and then scanned original art, flowers, frames, floor plans, house parts, word art and more.

Papers

Elements

Here's an individual view of some of the elements, but not all of them are here (about 17 less than the 62 count).

The first kit I had a part in is shown below.  "Passion" is a kit about Jesus' last week on earth before the resurrection.  Whether art journaling or faithbooking, the kit is designed to provoke your thoughts to go in new directions and provide some materials to help take you there.  We pray the words and works of believers from previous centuries as well as our own new creations will inspire you.

Elements included:

Papers included:

Here are some layouts created with "Passion."

Thanks for stopping by today!  Hope your day is filled with blessings! 

NOT a JOKE!! FREE April Desktop Calendar

HAPPY APRIL to you!

No April Fooling Around here!  This really IS free!  :D  Click on the preview to go to the download and find out about the beautiful kit I used to create it with!

Art Journaling Adventures

I mentioned in my post yesterday that I would show you some of my art journaling spreads I have done over the last month or so.  I am so VERY, very new to this and don't know (rather doubt) if you will get any inspiration from seeing these, LOL!  Hopefully, it will get better the longer I do it.  These pages are not great, but I'm having fun doing them and learning as I go along!  Besides, the number 1 rule is that there are NO RULES!  I LOVE that!

Art journaling has always intrigued me, just as anything arts and crafts has always done since I can remember!  When I decided to take a break from digital scrapbook kit designing to learn the PSCS5 program that my wonderful son bought for me, I decided it would be a great time to explore this world of art journaling.

It started when Cilenia Curtis had a CT call back in the middle part of 2012.  I was still designing at that time, but I was very tired of creating the "traditional" scrapbooking kit.  I decided it would be a good way to learn the digital art journaling from Cilenia and was thrilled when she accepted me for her CT.  It wasn't long before it turned from digital to mixed media to create my own digital brushes to use in my designing.  But, I was still feeling a bit burnt out and decided in August that at the end of September I would take a break from designing.

Well, sometime in December, I got wind of a free, on-line class to make an art journal.  So, I took Effy Wild's Book Binding class 101 at Wild Soul Arts and the rest is history, as they say!  The first pictures show the book I made and the decorating of the cover.  And the rest of the photos are of the pages I've done so far.  I got some Christmas money and spent it on art supplies:  Tattered Angels Glimmer Mists, Crafter's Workshop Stencils, Acrylic Craft paints, Gesso, Molding Paste, all kinds of stamps and stamp pads, art pencils and a few oil crayons plus some "hardware" for doing mixed media canvases like Anna Dabrowska.  THOSE I haven't been brave enough to tackle yet, even though I've been collecting things to create them with!  One of these days you will see those on here, too!  :D

So, here is the art journal I made using white canvas, watercolor paper and jute twine.  To find out how to make it, click on the Wild Soul Arts link above.  It is a free class and I think you could still take it.

The next assignment was to decorate the cover.  I used a pack of coordinating tissue paper that I got at Dollar Tree years ago when I still lived in WV.  This was applied to the cover with gel medium (I used 1:1 ratio of Elmers glue and water).

Here's a close-up so you can see the texture.  I purposefully "wrinkled" the tissue paper to get this texture.

So, here is my first spread I did.  The mesh you see is cheesecloth.  I didn't like it for the art journal paper as it is too stiff and harsh for me.  The other texture you see around the photo and the bird was created with molding paste.  The "shine" you see is from the Tattered Angels Glimmer Mists.  And there are a few of the Crafter's Workshop stencils vaguely in the background.

When I started this page, I didn't know WHERE I was going or would end up, LOL!  Inspiration started with the song, "I Will Sing of the Mercies of the Lord" and then I found the verse of Scripture that I wanted to use.  The cross was created from molding paste.  The stenciled white is a Crafter's Workshop stencil, as is the stenciled verse.  The heart is free-handed.  The journaling is free-handed.  The small hearts are some Studio G stamps I got at Walmart.  I painted the blue on the background first, using a cross-hatch type of technique and while the blue was still wet, I finger painted the yellow in so I could blend it in a little bit around the edges with the blue.

This one is a little crazy, lol!  I had the idea that I wanted to use a tag and a "doll" on this page.  I started with spraying various colors of Glimmer Mists to the background.  Then I added some stencils and sprayed some more Glimmer Mists.  I sprayed the final top, right-hand side HEAVY and tipped the journal to allow the Glimmer Mist to run down the page.  I sprayed and stenciled the tag and wrote the verse on it (No good thing will He withhold from me if I walk uprightly.  Psalm 84:11).  I drew the doll and colored her with regular coloring pencils and glued her down.  Thinking her dress was to plain and boring, I splattered some Glimmer Mist on her and then stamped a few "so thankfuls" and "be happys" around the page which, except for the one at the top, you cannot really see.

This one I did for the Project Life 365 prompt of Confused.  I had just been talking about the Tower of Babel Bible story with someone, so that was the first thing that popped into my mind and instead of doing a picture for the prompt, I did a journal spread.  The left side of the page was inspired by something I saw on the internet.  The right side is just free-handed drawing and text.  The background on both sides is Glimmer Mists.  The black, red and brick color is acrylic craft paints.

This one was totally inspired by my granddaughter's beautiful, spunky smile as she posed for her mommy one day playing in the snow.  I used various stencils for the text with a permanent marker.  I painted the tree with acrylic craft paint and then added some modeling paste for the snow and also in the bottom corner for snow.  I had to paint it with white acrylic craft paint to get it to show up as snow.  The other color on the page are Glimmer Mists.

This page started with a quote that was going around facebook that my DIL saw and shared and said she thought of the photo of her daughter standing by the ocean with her arms spread when she read the quote.  So, that was the inspiration.  I did some stenciling, made the butterflies on and above my granddaughter, painted the top one with Glimmer Mists and the bottom one with ink pad.  Bent the wings up and glued the body to the page for the 3D effect.

I think this is my favorite so far.  It was alot of work to get the journaling and title on the page, but so worth the elbow grease!  The morning glory vine is a brush in one of Cilenia's kits that I printed out, traced with a graphite pencil and then transferred to the journal.  I found out that the ink jet ink would transfer to the journal, too, so instead of doing the extra graphite pencil step, I just fixed the title and journaling to print backwards so that I could then transfer it to the journal.  I still had to go over the ink to make it dark enough to see.  The first thing I did was to decide what colors I wanted the morning glories to be and what color I wanted to use on the leaves.  I then painted and blended both of those colors onto the background.  Then painted in the morning glories and the vine.  I am really loving this!  :D

I was reminded of this acronym while listening to Christian radio one day and decided it would make a great art journal spread.  So, I sprayed and stenciled the background using Glimmer Mists and acrylic craft paints.  Then I placed the letters where I wanted them to go and glued them down.  I stamped the acronyms on each letter and there you have it!

And, here is the one I finished today.  This is a song I heard on Christian radio this past Sunday.  I used stencils to create the door and stone wall on the bottom right.  The bicycle is a Studio G stamp as are the scattered black keys and flower-type shapes.  I did the background a bit differently on this one.  I sprayed my FAVORITE Glimmer Mist color, Dragonfly, which is the teal color, then rubbed it to make it look like water color instead of spritzes.  Then I laid down the letters of "PRAYER" and sprayed the "Mardi Gras" Glimmer Mist.  Let that dry before removing the letters.  Then used a stencil for "FAITH" and sprayed on the Mardi Gras color.  I outlined the letters with a black oil crayon to give them a little dimension.  Then I did the stamping and the journaling.

Well, I hope you have enjoyed looking at my pages and reading about the process and what inspired each page.  I hope you have gotten even just a teensy weensy bit of inspiration from my art journaling adventures so far!

Blessings to you!

Need Some Inspiration?

Yesterday I told you that I would post some pages I have created lately with product from Scrap Art Studio.  I CT exclusively for Cilenia Curtis, Angie Young and Aria (Lynne Anzelc).  I really haven't done too much scrapping since Christmas.  And with the family get-together in January and the sickness, not much in the way of layouts to show you, but hopefully these will inspire you.  And, in case you are wondering who the BEAUTIFUL children are in my layouts, they are my grandchildren!  :D

Both of these pages use Cilenia's new Follow Your Art - Moving Forward Bundle.  The inspiration for this first art journal page came from an art journal page I saw on the internet.

The inspiration for this page came from scraplifting 2 layouts from the gallery for the Double Scraplift Challenge in the forum at SAS.

Both of these pages used Cilenia's Follow Your Art - Authentic.

These 2 pages were done using Aria's portion of the Follow Your Art - Authentic.

Here's a couple using Aria's Winter Magic.  LOVE the shades of blue!

Here's a couple I did using Angie's portion of the Follow Your Art - Authentic.

And the last 2 to show you are using Angie's Altered Christmas.

Hope something you saw inspired you!  Tomorrow, I'll show you some art journaling pages I have done in my hand-bound journal!  Have a great evening!