Gold Star – Bonnie

If you have visited the forum of the Campus in the last months or so, you surely have seen Bonnie post. She has been a long time member of the Campus (since April 2012!!) and enjoys the challenges, the games and showing off her various projects. Let's meet Bonnie.

Tell us a bit about you

My name is Bonnie Ballentine. I was born and raised in South Carolina, USA. In high school, I had a teacher who taught all of us to love our home state. We studied US History from a South Carolina perspective...always! Miss Daniels was very successful and all my classmates and I love our home state. My high school was located on the campus of the University of South Carolina; therefore, I am a huge Gamecock fan...did I say really big?

I came along before Title IX (equal opportunity for girls and women in sports) and had few opportunities to play sports. My Dad said once I realized I could walk I never slowed down or stopped moving. There was no stopping me. I'll bet I was a hand full for my parents. Sadly, my Mom was unable to have more children so I am an only child.

My Dad was right and to this day I am still active in sports. I played high school basketball...very unusual for the day but had no sports opportunities other than intramurals in college. I was a physical education teacher for 32 years so I had ample opportunity to share my passion for sports and I was always sure to include the girls. One of my students actually had the opportunity to try out for the USA Olympic Team. I am very proud of her accomplishments!

I play basketball in the Senior Games and about 5 years ago added pickleball to my Senior Sports. I am a founding member of NOVA United Senior Women Basketball Association and am also a founding member of Old Dominion Dinkers, a local pickleball club. I work out with a personal trainer 2 hours each week and play pickleball 4 to 6 days each week. See, I told you my Dad was right!

How did you get to work with PSP?

I am 74 years old and I was dragged into the computer age kicking and screaming. I found computers very confusing in the beginning. My first computer was an Apple hand-me-down. My first purchased computer was a Windows 98 PC. Once I began to surf the web I really enjoyed computing. Somewhere on the web, I saw a "signature" and desperately wanted one with my name. Once I found one I was hooked and I wanted to learn to make signatures...or tags. I found an MSN group, Gracious Ladies Artistic Signatures, aka, GLAS, and took off from there. I have joined and taken lessons from several groups over the years. I learned the most from Jemima's Artistry In PSP. However, all the lessons revolved around signatures. I loved tagging but eventually, copyright got in the way. I understand and agree with copyright but the artist kept changing their terms of use and it just got too hard keeping up with whose work you could use.

How did you get to join the Campus?

When my basketball group began I decided I wanted to make a scrapbook and from there my love of digital scrapbooking grew. I roamed the web looking for supplies and eventually found Carole and the Campus. I am slow to spend a dollar and it took a very long time for me to purchase classes. I attended a couple of webinars, purchased the reduced priced video available to participants and am now a Diamond Member. I am loving it. Wish I had more time to study, view the videos and make more scrap pages. I'm working as fast as I can. I am learning so much in the Campus. PSP can do so much more than I ever imagined. My first version of PSP was PSP 8...and it remains my favorite to this day. I currently use 2018.

Would you share some of your projects?

Over the years I have lost many of my signatures but my early ones were simply a tube with a name. A "sig" was usually created no larger than 400X400, 72dpi. As time went by I learned shadows, effects, plug-ins, etc. Here is one of my early sigs:

Some of the later sigs looked like a scrap page.

This one is a picture of my Dad:

My first scrap page:

I began scrapping 8X10 for ease and expense of printing. That's me on the far left. These are the founding members of our group and 4 of us still play. The lady on the far right is our founder and she was 68 when this photo was taken.

I enjoy Carole's challenges and some of my latest pages are from those challenges. This is a double page. 12X24

Do you want to join Bonnie? Check out our forum. She is hanging there very regularly.

And what about all those layouts and techniques? 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!