Gold Star – Rae

Let's meet another member of our growing Campus community. And again, although she is part of a "scrapbook" campus, her main focus is not scrapbooking!

Tell us a bit about you

I'm Rae Bordua. I live with my husband Leon and our long-haired German Shepherd Hawkeye in San Francisco, California. We are the owners of an online tea and Asian teaware shop, Holy Mountain Trading Company, and have been in business together for 25+ years. In the past, our company has been featured in major magazines, such as TIME Magazine Asia, Country Living, Cooking Light, and Fancy Foods Magazine, and currently is a listed resource in many books on tea.

Back in the early 1980s for four months, I sailed from Puerta Vallerta, Mexico to the Marquesas and the Society Islands on a 50-ft yacht. I fell in love with the area and have returned for visits a couple of times since then.
In the early 1990s I gained some renown as a maker of miniature porcelain dollhouse dolls scaled 1" to 1'. My dolls were shown in magazines such as Miniature Showcase, Miniature Collector, Nutshell News and others, as well as spotlighted in high-end Christmas jewelry store displays in downtown San Francisco. My dolls were known especially for their attention to detail and intricate costuming using antique fabric, laces and trims.

How did you get to work with PSP?

I bought my first computer in the mid-1980s, well before the Internet was publicly available, and have had one ever since. PSP was the first graphics program I had and I've always been grateful to Jasc Software for their free software made available when I first began viewing pictures on the Internet. When Corel purchased Jasc Software I continued to be their loyal customer ever since due to that initial positive interaction.

How did you get to join the Campus?

Up until recently, I have been self-taught on using PSP. Not long ago I watched one of Carole's Corel PSP seminar presentations, enjoyed her teaching style and learned a lot, then followed the link to her Scrapbook Campus site, signed up for the e-mail list, and took advantage of last year's St. Patrick's Day 50% discount on a beginning scrapbooking course. I had such a good time with it and learned so much, not just about digital scrapbooking, which was a whole new concept for me, but also how to use a number of other functions in the PSP program that I previously had no idea about. The education in photo editing has been incredibly useful for our business as well. I feel so much more confident around PSP since exploring some of Carole's classes at the Lab, through the Diamond membership, and especially by participating in the periodic Challenges, which I love. I have picked up so much in a flash of insight just by looking at fellow members' interpretations of the Challenge and their work.

Would you share some of your projects?

Here's one of my first scrapbooking pages

and a more recent, two-page scrapbooking spread from an art exhibit Leon and I attended recently at the Legion of Honor, "Truth and Beauty" about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood movement and their historical inspiration.

And this layout was part of the Double-Take Challenge, that took place in May 2018 right here in the Campus.

I look forward to continued creative inspiration and the joy of learning with Carole and the gifted artistic community at Scrapbook Campus!

Come and see what other projects Rae is posgin in the forum. he is hanging there very regularly.

Whether you are starting as a scrapbooker or you just want to learn more about PaintShop Pro, you can gain access to a very large vault of tutorials and classes (hundreds of them) through our DIAMOND membership. Come and check it out. There is so much to discover!