Pixie Treasures

Well, it’s been quite some time since you’ve heard from me. As you know, this site and this business were just not working out for me. So I’ve been flat out setting up a different one, called Radenbrea Studios.

I’m not going to be carrying on with this Scrapbooking site any more so any free downloads will be on the other site, if and when I get time to make them. However, and this is where my main focus will be, I will be selling my art on our new Zazzle Store. I hope you’ll drop by the new website and blog and sign up there, and I hope you’ll check out the store at Zazzle and maybe even like my products enough to purchase some At the very lease, please ‘like’ my store as it helps enormously.

Thank you so much for your continued support.

Love and Hugs

Brenda

Hello Everyone

This week I have 6 pretty lacy motifs for you. All absolutely FREE Enjoy!

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Hi Everyone

I have a lovely pack of assorted paper flowers and leaves for you tonight. I would love to see what you do with them if you feel like emailing me picture

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Hello Everyone. I’m sorry for the long absence. We had to go out of town for a few days and have just got back a couple of days ago.

Since getting back I’ve been making some Fairy theme tags and things for a new mini album and thought I’d share some with you. So here are 3 contact sheets of png’s for you to use in your own designs and scrappin. Enjoy

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Hi Everyone

We have finally had some fine weather, although it bucketed down last night again. I did manage to take some photos of the finished Mini Album today, in between batches of Peanut Brownies which I was making for my hubby.

So here it is. The first finished albumn. The second one is nearly done also so I should have photos of that in a few days. Oh, and if you like it, you can buy it on Trademe!

That’s it for now. I’ll have another freebie ready for you all soon. Thanks for visiting! *hugs*

Brenda

It’s times like this that I’m glad that my hobbies are all indoor ones. We seem to have had nothing but rain lately. While that has given me lots of time to spend on the mini albums, it has not provided good light for taking photos of them. Sure I could use a flash, but flashes seem to wash all the colour out of pictures and they don’t look half as good. So I’ll be keeping you waiting for those photos for a bit longer. I’ve finished the first one and the second one is almost done. I also have the next two planned and I’m in the ‘gathering goodies’ for them stage with them.

I made some cute tags today for the mini I’m currently working on, and I thought you might like them, so I’ve added some digital ribbon and made up a freebie for you. Enjoy!

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Thanks for visiting!

Hi Everyone

I have a new freebie for you – 6 lovely flowers which I hope you’ll get lots of use out of. But before I show you a picture of them, I have pictures of the progress I’m making on the mini albums.

Well, as you can see I have not got very far with this one. That’s for two reasons. I made all the signatures, stitched them and glued them together and had them drying under a heavy book. All good so far.

While they were drying I started working on an envelope mini, which means my desk is absolutely covered in all the goodies for that project. Turns out that 5 signatures were not enough to fill the spine of the first album. So I have to make some more, but I can’t do that until I have finished the envelop mini and cleaned all the left overs away.

So, I have some ‘work in progress’ photos of the envelope mini for you:

5 Black envelops, with their flaps all glued together.

Inside the front cover and the 1st page. I love working with black envelops or card as it frames the pretty papers so nicely.

Pages 2 & 3. Lots of places and tags for photos and journaling.

Pages 4 & 5. See the wee butterflys and flowers? all punched out and shaped from scraps left over from cutting out the page linings, pockets etc.

Page 6 is as far as I’ve got so far. I’ll show you what happens when you undo the bow on this page next time.

“You’ve been at this all day Mum, can we go play ball now?”

And now for tonights freebie. Enjoy!

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During this past week I have been sorting out supplies in my craft room and getting ready to make some Altered Books and Mini Albums. I just adore these and I have so many ideas I want to put into action. In the last couple of days I have finally started, so I have some photos to show you of my progress so far.

But before I do that. How many of you have been looking at the Pixie Treasures Pinterest inspiration board? There are so many wonderful ideas there, along with links to lots of freebies and tutorials all generously provided for free on the websites of the wonderful online creative community. I know some of you only do your craft on the computer – digi scrapping for example, and that a lot of the pictures are for actual physical greeting cards and such. But you can still use them for inspiration, and to prove it, I have one to show you that I made for my daughter for her recent birthday.

This is the card from the Pinterest board that I used for inspiration:

And here is the one I made – digitally – for my daughter:

You can see that there are lots of differences, but the layout is basically the same and the colours are similar. This is because of my little (until now) secret. You see, I can make stuff for you guys to use in your layouts. But I rarely do layouts myself. Because when it comes to putting them together I suddenly have a lack of confidence and fits of indecision. And if you think I’m bad digitally? you should see me doing layouts in real life – cos this is where if you do something wrong you can waste precious resources. And we all know that craft resources are not cheap!

So I fiddle and faddle about and it takes me ages to decide on things. Even tho I had a layout to copy for this one it still took me a whole day to put together! *sigh* So, there you have it, my dirty little secret.

I think the seam binding ribbon in the original is much prettier than my bow. Do you know that you cannot even buy seam binding in New Zealand? WTF??? I know – I am going to have to order it from the states would you believe! Crazy! I asked for some in the shops and no one even knew what I was talking about!

So I found some papers that were similar in colour toning as the original but not the same. Then I tattied up the edges by using the burn and dodge tools in photoshop. Then I added the stitches and embossed them to try and get a more realistic look.

Then I added a strip of paper with stripes across it, lay the lace strip beside it and the green ribbon over the two of them. The postcard with the back showing goes underneath these strips, but the front one goes on top.

I found some suitable photoshop brushes to do the swirly effect along the edge of the green paper and for the ends of the postcard and applied those, along with a shadow on the postcard ones.

Then I made the bow and attached that, and found two pins in my collection of images and slid them in. I had to recolour the button because I didn’t have a green one. The stars are not glittery like the original ones. This is because when I had my previous troubles with photoshop I lost a lot of my styles and other presets, so I just had to make do with a silver one.

The pretty vintage tag at the top with the rose on it is from Far Far Hill. I put the Happy Birthday wording on it and the string. Then I added a wee tag down the bottom with my Daughters name on it and the year.

So although it’s similar, it’s not the same. I think it came out pretty well. What do you think?

My First Altered Book Project

While looking through the DIY and Crafts section of Pinterest the other day, I came across a page with lots of Art Journals, Altered Books and Mini Albums on it. Wow! I just adore these and I’ve wanted to try my hand at making them for a while. So I watched some of the video tutorials and am now totally inspired.

For my first one I have found an old book and ripped out the pages. My Mum was a school teacher and a librarian – she will be looking down from above, most unhappy with me! Sorry Mum! but you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, as my hubby keeps reminding me. I was so excited to get started that I forgot to take a ‘before’ shot of the book before I tore out the pages and painted the cover, but here is what it’s looking like at the moment:

This book cover was a faded yukky orange. I coated it in charcoal acrylic paint and then dried it with my hot air gun. Then I drybrused cream over the outside, concentrating more in certain areas than others. After that was dry I used Walnut distressing ink to give it an aged dirty and worn look. This did not come out as well as I’d hoped. I wanted the brown of the ink darker but after several coats it was still too light. Since these pictures I have modge podged the whole outside to seal it, and that has made the ink show up darker and it’s looking much better.

While the cover was drying I started sorting and making the decorations for the outside. First I wanted a background matt and not having anything suitable I took a paper doily and painted it an olive green. This caused me some trouble too. The first one I did I lay down on some scrap paper and applied the green paint. Only trouble was that the paint, when going through the holes in the doily, completely glued it too the paper underneath and I couldn’t seperate them without ripping the doily. Scrunch up and throw into the trash bin. Second attempt I painted sections at a time, lifting it off the paper as I went and drying it a bit at a time so it would not stick to the paper underneath. This one worked much better:

While that finished drying I started putting together the first flower to go on the cover. I found a length of lace and sewed a running stitch along one edge, pulling it up to make it frilly, then attaching the ends together do it was a frilly circle. Then I pulled some outer petal layers from a small fabric rose and using Tacky Glue, stuck them in the middle of the of the lace circle. Finally, I scrounged around in a tin of old earings and found a lovely pearl one with wee diamond like stones around it. I broke the backing of it and glued it into the centre of the flower:

Oops, probably should have cropped that photo first. Never mind, you can still see it. Pretty isn’t it? That’s number one. I have lots more to make.

That is as far as I’ve got with this book. I’ll post more photos after I’ve done some more work on it.

If any of you are making altered books or mini albums, I would love to see pictures of them or hear about your ideas and experiences.

Thanks for stopping by

Brenda xx

I hope you all like these pretty dress tags that I have for your freebie. Aren’t they the cutest? hehe Enjoy!

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Hi Everyone

As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve had a lot going on in our lives recently. Combine that with the pressure I put on myself by trying to make something new and putting it on here as a freebie every day, and I was starting to realise that I was putting too much pressure on myself. So I took a few days off as a mental health break.

When I decided to put out a new freebie every day I made a commitment, to myself and to my readers – that’s you! I’ve tried hard to keep that promise, often staying up until well after midnight because it was the only time I could find to complete it. But over the last few days I have had to review that commitment. Why do I do it? Partly for the love of it, of course. I love making things, creating, trying new techniques and learning along they way. The other part was that I hoped to get some kind of community going here. To meet other people who shared the pleasure of digi-scrapping. To exchange ideas and possibly even make a few friends. That part has been a disappointment. I know by my reports that a lot of people download my freebies, but only one person, always the same person, ever leaves me a comment and says ‘thank you’. For months now it has only been the one person, so I can’t help wondering why I am bothering. Why I am putting myself under so much pressure. For what? For whom? What am I doing wrong, or not doing right? Can anyone tell me?

So, for now, I am giving myself permission to relax and not feel pressured to post every day. Although I will still upload freebies as often as I can. I need to spend more time on other parts of my life too. At least I know, for example, that if I go do some baking – my hubby will appreciate it! lol

Anyway, here is your next freebie

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