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It has been 5 weeks for me. It started the last week of January and it has only been the Creation Cassel newsletter email that have been going into spam. I distinctly remember that it happened the week before the last Master Class. It could have been gmail doing it though. They tend to throw stuff into spam just for the heck of it. And, then there are the ones I have put on my block list that still come through... Between spammers and robocalls, they sure have made things frustrating for many people! LOL I'll just keep checking spam on Sundays!

Although it has not been 5 weeks, but I have done some changes about 2 weeks ago in the backend. If you want the long explanation, here it is. The creationcassel.com domain is on a shared server. Because of that, the server IP is often flagged by various email providers as "spammy". I know it is not me spamming anyone, but others on the server. For that reason, the host changes the server IP about every day, so what is flagged as spam one day, shouldn't be the next day. However, some email providers are much pickier (gmx was a big one) and just about none of the emails coming from the server (so emails from the store, or from me directly) would not go through. The scrapbookcampus.com domain, however, is on a VPS so it is not flagged as spammy. So, what I did was get all the emails from the creationcassel.com sites to go through the VPS. This required quite a bit of changes in the DNS, SFP, and such. The result is that now, invoices from the store, or direct emails from me, go directly through the VPS and won't be flagged as spammy so they finally reach the recipients. So that is the extend that I can do to help. Now, everyone uses their own providers/system and they all seem to have various tolerance level for spam (or what they think it spammy). I also suspect that they might be changing their alogrithm once in a while in order to catch the spammers who try to be smarter. Yeah, it is annoying for you. I wish there was a magical button I could push to fix that for everyone!

For the last 5 weeks, the Sunday newsletter from Creation Cassel has ended up in my spam folder. I use gmail so it is not because of my provider. And, I mark it as "not spam" every single time. Looking at the different emails I receive, they actually don't all have the same sender info. So for me, the only one that gets caught in spam is the Sunday newsletter. All others come through fine.

Dear friends : ) Thank you for all your kind words:)))))

Hi Cindy, my daughter, daughter-in-law, and 3 grandchildren (all girls) went there quite some years ago - we did a Ya-Ya-Sister weekend. We did do the baths - the water feels good. I also went there with a friend of mine and we did not go in the pools that time, but we did do "crystal mining" and then went to the diamond mine to poke around in the offall from the mine. Diamonds have actually been found in the slag.

I scrapped the only photos I have from anything related to St. Patrick's Day back in 2012. Also, even though the grandparents of my Dad's mother came from County Kerry Ireland, St. Patrick's Day was not something that was celebrated by Dad and his siblings when growing up. My 2012 layout made with a kit that has long been retired. I'm not sure if the designer is even still designing!

Just today I took some photos of the crocusses that are blooming in a little open space along a footpath near my house and it gave me the idea for this scraplift. The background is from my stash and I used part of a crochet frame. The top flower is made by using the ribbon flower script and the flower bouquet is from CF and I have it for a long time in my stash. The datestamp is a freebe by Carole which I recolored. Fonts are Chirp the CF-freebie from today and Arienne for the letters S. A welcome diversion before I'm starting on the plaid papers for the Build a Kit Workshop.

For this I used Cassel's cass-StarburstTemplateMaker. An overlay by Marisa Lerin (digital scrapbook) Font : Brush Script MT

I used Ann's template...thank you, Ann! The background was an accident but I like it and decided to keep it. I had used a different color and added a texture. Then I decided I didn't like that color so I floodfilled with the green. The texture was underneath and the green didn't fill everything. One of my pickleball players brought cut flowers and gave them to those who wanted them. My daffodils are not blooming yet...budded but not blooming, so I was happy to receive these.

Scraplifting is one of my favorite challenges. I always start with copying the example and enlarging it to 3600. Then I reduce the colors to grayscale. From there I build a template, keeping the original as my base layer, and filling in shades from black to white for each component, be it full sized paper or embellishment. I make all photo areas black. At the end, I increased the colors to 8bit so there will be a full palette available. Here is my finished template in a reduced version for posting here. I will put the full sized version on our Facebook and the .pspimage in the Files area there for those who want a head start. Feel free to download it and start creating! I will be back with my own new creation in a while. Edit: I did discover that the black areas for photos didn't work in the Raster-to-Mask script until I used Negative Image on them again and they turned white. Then the script was ok.

Re-posting this for the challenge. It's one of the extra masks in the workshop. I totally did it over as square to match the frame. I went back and found the colors were restricted to 256 so I upped it.

This is Day 1 Extra and I made a card for an upcoming birthday, so I won't post this on Facebook otherwise the card will maybe seen before the actual birthday date.

So great to now know how to make templates into masks. I usually do not do scrapbook pages as I am more of a tagger for myself, friends, & family. Anyway, I moved the photos around once I figured out what text to use and how much space I would need for it (aging eyes require larger fonts now). The font is Cotton Candies. I also recoloured the photo frames to subdue them. I don't post any people photos on the internet so I used a stock photo from a graphics site to which I have a paid subscription. The background paper is by Anitess at Deviant Art. Since the mask effect erased a bit of the tree drawing on the left side of the paper, I did a cut & paste of the original paper on top of the merged image to correct that. Wonderful lesson. Am eagerly anticipating the next one. Sharon

Here is the baby of the family, all grown up now. No matter how many times I do the steps to convert a PSD mask to a PSP mask, I always have to go back and redo it at least once. Eventually muscle memory will kick in.

normally when using templates I am mostly open my old CS2 because of the clipping mask feature. So now I learned it for PSP , thank you Carole for this workshop, here is my 5 year youmger Sister, she died suddenly in October 2022

I had already put my mind to using the background photo as the main photo for day 1 of the Mask challenge. We can have clear blue skies, but when the wind blows with such force, visibility is greatly diminished by blowing snow. I used the mask which came with Day 1 of the Love story challenge (Masks) back in 2017. I did have to edit it to accommodate the Blue Jay. The mask suited the layout I had in mind. I placed the blue frame, over and under the brown one. The page itself came together quickly, the word art took a little longer. I didn't use a 12x12 scrap page, I used the size of the photo.

I didn't want to make a Valentine page but the colors lend themselves to a love theme so much! Valentine was and still is not a big thing overhere; it mostly, at least with the elderly people, is looked at as very commercial. Just before Valentiine the flowers are much more expensive and they go down in price after that! It is getting bigger this days with cards and offers of chocolate etc. So I decided to make something with the things I love: flowers and photograpgy which must come as no surprise as you know me by now. I used the Heart Mask that came with this theme and 2 papers from Escale Amoureuze and recolored them to go with the palette. The photo of the Dahlia had much of the colors of the palette in it. Heartpunches from from Caole and the freebie tag from this week; I used the black one and colored it with a gradient made with the palette colors.