Every once in a while my plans for the day take a sharp left turn and I end up somewhere completely unexpected. I suppose that happens to a lot of us - on-line and off!
This weekend is our Canadian Thanksgiving (we celebrate on Monday and the kids were off school on Friday) and I am suffering from a bad case of time management break-down combined with a mild case of laundry fatigue! I cannot believe how fast time has flown since Labour Day. As a family we have been busier than ever with many commitments that include all things hockey for 2/3rds of the family; choir retreats and practices for Chloe; typical life of a teenager and grade 10 studies for Claire; plans for upcoming visits and celebrations with our families; putting together some ideas for my new Ella appointment, and more!
The weekend plan was to coordinate my first ever December Daily project. In anticipation of Ali Edwards' post on Friday, I had run over to Forever Scrapbooks in Burlington to pick up some papers and then checked out a number of projects on Flickr. Oodles of GREAT STUFF which I will share later this week.
In the meantime, after looking at some of those incredible and inspiring projects, I was struck with all kinds of ideas and ZERO idea how to accomplish them. They are all dependent on me being able to do more things in PSE than I know how to do. I am pretty good with the basic concepts, but all the things I want to do requires a bit more knowledge.
As she often does, the articulate, patient and talented, Cathy Zielske came to my rescue. This post can also be known as "How I spent all day Friday and Saturday".
I spent hours learning ... and transcribing her Vimeo Tutorials:
Multi Photo Grids: The PDF on Ali's post didn't work, so I made my own :)
Frame & Overlay: Even though this is taught in CS3 I got it!
Word Art Card Tutorial: Brilliance!
Simple Digital Template Tutorial: okay, so it was "simple" once I heard it all
Hybrid Scrapping Tutorial: this is my preferred method of memory keeping and appreciate learning how to be more efficient/effective.
Rounded Corners Tutorial: a real surprise since I didn't realize how much I'd enjoy learning this, I almost skipped over it completely.
and a whole bunch more recent entries, you can go to Cathy's Vimeo Account.
If you are interested in learning PSE, you can learn so much from these basic videos. I know I did. I love that Cathy adds some "extras" that are just fun to know. I love that I could just hit the pause button and replayed everything I didn't "get" the first - or the fifth time round! I have a lot of notes, and my copy of the Missing Manual, but the terminology is different and I prefer a more scrapbooking based approach.
I'm glad I took the time to listen to all of these, and to take notes! With the upcoming holidays, I have many new ideas for cards, gifts and projects. These tutorials have definitely got the wheels turning and I've filled up a more than just a few pages in my idea book!
