Corrie Kinkel

6 hours ago, Sharla said:

Hi Susan, I grow lots of things in raised beds and containers. The larger the container the least likely I am to change the soil but, in some cases, like with blueberries and the acer, I remove a couple of inches of the top layer of soil and add some fresh. If I don’t do this then I make sure that I give the plant a liquid feed during the growing season. 

Most of my annual plants like tomatoes, peas, and asters get planted into containers that still have some of last year’s soil within them – I just top up with fresh compost to give them a good start and feed them during the growing season. The old compost is added to borders or to the compost bin.

The idea of changing the soil is just impossible for me with the number of containers that I use so I generally don’t. To be honest,  I never found it very useful advice because it usually means that if the plant has a large root ball you need a bigger pot each year – and that’s just not practical as well as expensive. I just accept that some plants will thrive under my method and that some won’t.

 I never move pots around to catch the sun like you describe – once they have their spot that’s where they stay for the growing season. Out of the two you mention – if the conditions are good, rosemary really thrives (not in my garden!) but thyme always tends to get woody and needs to cut back drastically after each growing season or replaced. The best advice I can give you is to experiment, accept both the successes and the failures, and enjoy the process. And, if you don’t want to repot then start your young plants in a larger pot.

You’ll always have some plants that thrive and others that don’t. I used to try follow gardening advice but I’m not very good at following rules so I just experiment. I celebrate the good results and accept the failures as part of the learning process which never ends. 
 

I wholeheartedly agree with Sharla, plants in pots/containers are always a risk and sometimes it is a mystery or a miracle. Nowadays we only have plants in containers and we try to give them shade or sun according to their needs. But that is only a rule of thumb and some experience from our gardening days.

Card 3-Extra

I have used the normal template so often for X-mas, Easter, New Baby, Birthday and Thank you that I now choose the extra one. However I used some of the ideas like the lines on the background and some sort of frame. My photos with white flowers and I gave them a little bit of shadow, just as the strip behind them. The heart is from Chantalia Design but recolored; the fonts are Crocus Monogram and Clarissa stories and both have a inner bevel to let them stand out a bit better. The Dutch word sterkte means you wish somebody courage with a particular situation, for instance this card is meant for a friend who has to undergo an unpleasant medical treatment. It has a backside and in this case I will write something inside by hand not printed.

On 5/20/2024 at 11:25 PM, Sharla said:

Week 20 I have small acer tree in a container and just adore the bright colour of the leaves as they appear. I was pleased to catch this image with raindrops on the leaves.

 

Sharla I wonder does your acer well in a container, do you have it in a fairly big container? I would like to have one and it must go in a container, we only have a small patio. However our local gardencenter is advising against it, so I would like to hear how well yours is doing. By the way the leaves are gorgeous.

6 hours ago, Michele said:

Loving everything, especially from our "newbies." I'm very impressed.

I was so looking forward to this workshop, but I don't know if I'll be able to participate due to an injury. Since there is no time limit for the workshops, I hope to be able to start soon and catch up. 🤞

Michele that is very unlucky, I hope you recover soon.

I was struggling to make an intropage for the photos I took from the daily life and things I did at home. After some thought I concluded that there was one item that covers it all: the place where they live! So I used the cass-photocircle template script again, this time with hearts and photos I took in Los Altos plus the seal of the city (thanks to google). The family photos will come on the next photo pages in the album. I wrote a short story about the place, of course in Dutch, but roughly translated it says: "Los Altos is a nice city in Santa Clara County in Silicon Valley and ca 40 mile from San Francisco. Downtown, the compact older part of the city has a lot of nice shops and restaurants to eat outside. Many of the streets have big trees that provide shadow". The background is a photo with reduced opacity of the frontyard of their house. 

Workshop day 2

This time I used the original template and it is again a birthday card, probably all my cards will be for birthdays and this one goes by mail. It is intended for my cousin who likes butterflies very, very much; she has butterflies on her plates, cups and saucer, posters, photos, bracelets, brooches etc. Every year I try to make her a card with butterflies or send one that a bought when I come across one. I indeed need a double card so that's what I made and show here. The text is in Dutch but I kept a psp version for use with a different language. The butterflies are a bunch of watercolor cliparts that I have for a long time in my stash, I knew that one day they would come in handy. The font is Calligraphy and I it often because it is easy to read.

On 5/20/2024 at 9:15 AM, Cristina said:

I have the same feeling as I have created just a few layouts over the last few years.    I don't know how long it will last, but I'm on a roll, as Sue said. 😄 

What a great start, Corrie!   Which size are you using? I am still thinking of changing the size of my layouts to make it easier to get it printed.

Thank you Cristina and I'm glad you have the same feeling as well. I am going to use the same printservice I always use and I measured another of my albums. It is 29 x 21 cm (landscape format) and I had to calculate how much that would be for a scrap layout to fill a whole page of the album. I figured it will be 5140 x 3720 pix/inch and that let me use all of my supplies, but this is only for the 4 intropages. For the rest of the album I use and adapt the printservice's templates so I have at least an idea how to fill my album with my photos and text.

18 minutes ago, Dee347 said:

Here's the card I made for the workshop.  I used a image from Creative Fabrica.  Added texture to the scalloped panel and a drop shadow.  Added a ribbon and tag from Craftsuprint.com

(I make cards for the Cards For Hospitalized Kids Charity.  The kids range in age from 2 to 18 so I think this will work for the older girls.  Hopefully it will brighten their day.)

Nice card and a very nice charity to make cards for!

Card # 1

I used the extra template for 2024 and I changed the landscape format to portrait format to accommodate the photo I wanted to use. I'm very happy with the new extra templates for diamond members, because I have used the ones from the first workshop over and over again. That's not a problem as such but new templates give new ideas! As soon as I had taken this photo, I thought of a friend who loves purple very much and her birthday is coming up next month. I used a ribbon that I have made earlier and recolored it with hue, saturation, lightness. the flowers at the bottom are a sticker and the font is itsadzoke S01 and I think it came from a lab. The name of the flower is Echium candidans - Snakeweed

I'm on a roll! This is the last one of the intros and it is again a simple layout using a photo with a reduced opacity, except for the Mariposa Grove sign that I kept at 100%. There were information boards and I extracted them from the photos and put them here as info before the next photo pages in the album. I couldn't resist to make an admission ticket with my own script 😉.

I will make another intro but that one is with the family photos and I will not show those here because my family doesn't want me to do so. Which I of course will respect.

This is my second intro and it is a much simpler layout because it is all about Yosemite national park. It has a photo with reduced opacity as a background and I used cass-Multi frames collage freebie (as many of you have done) with another photo. Made a datestamp with cass-Datestamp 9 and an engraved rock (also a cass script). The flower is extracted from a photo; it is a California Dogwood and they were in flower throughout the valley in the park. I think I will use it on some of the photos in the album as well. The font of the title is Algerian and the rest is Bahnschrift. The idea for the title comes from a poster about the park which I bought when we were in San Luis Obispo. By chance we happened to come by an art gallery where they had posters of all the national parks. The old posters were, many years ago, made by an artist who gave before his death a young artist, named Thomas, the rights to design new poster. The only condition was that he had to do them in the same style and they are now printed and available in a limited and numbered edition. I don't have the font that he used on the poster but something similar that kept the idea. My son-in-law bought another one of a different park. The gallery packed mine rolled up in a tube and it came home with me where it has been laying under some books to get it straight again. We will frame it next week.

2 hours ago, Sue Thomas said:

Thank  you Corrie, coming from you that is quite the compliment.  As over a relatively short period of time in the Campus,  compared to more seasoned  Campus members, your work has evolved into something quite spectacular, as  have so many others.

Yes, I started off with the   best intentions of doing stitching.  Had I been allowed to make the stitching much larger, it would have been feasible.  The embossed effect  is a good substitute.

Sue thank you and I have to quote you in stating that this compliment coming from you means a lot to me! If and when I have time I will give this DIY a go, because it is a challenge I love.

13 hours ago, Sue Thomas said:

I maintained  the sizes of all the  pieces.  As for the dashed shapes, I started of by trying to create  proper stitching, with holes and all, but  they proved to be  to small.  I opted for  creating an embossed  effect instead.  As for the squiggly line, which I'm not fussed on, I decided to create  alpha, weaving  the letters through the  line. I used two of the  pieces for journaling, and the other two, to create a sort of split photo.  The framed ivy, is  one I created some time ago in gold, all  I had to do was to  colourize the ivy, and  frame.  As per usual I  used tutorials from the creative scrap on  the two journaling tags, to make them less boring.  Due to the  piece on the top left being  a little taller than the other two, I opted to tilt the pieces, so it wasn't  obvious.  Keeping everything exactly the same  size is a  bit of a challenge, but none the less fun. 

Sue a lovely page and you were quick in making it! As usual you have set the bar pretty high. I like how you used the curly line and I'm glad with your remark about the the dashed lines. Stitching was what came into my mind as well, so I will happily discard that idea!

I'm working on the intropages for a photo album of my recent trip. I have 3 "chapters" for my album and each one has a scrapbook page introducing the topic of that part. Here is the 1st one about the road trip we took. The dimensions of the layout are specific for the kind of printed album I choose. For this page I used the cass-Photo circle template script that I bought recently and I choose squares and how many I needed. This is a great script I will write a review in the store! Then I used the cass-label1 script with different colors to write the places where we went and the photos were taken. I have a US highway sign as a template that I can adapt. I had already made a californian numberplate with the screws , so I just had to write the date on it. The tire tracks are done with cass-Tire Track 1 -brush; I used a color with a texture and later a grungy brush on them as well. The background is made of a google map with some overlays and blendmodes. The blue sky is an overlay I have in my stash and the car and road sign are by DiHiller (blogtrain june 2023) and the little wooden cabin is by Marissa Lerin. I'm happy to get slowly back into scrapping!

A small pot of pansies that we bought just before I traveled to California has erupted in a big bunch of flowers! I have to deadhead them almost every day to keep it flowering! It is a joy to look at and I needed that because this week was all about rearranging a rack in our storeroom. Just before my trip we had to buy a new tumbler and everything was waiting until I was back to start altering things and deciding what we could do without and bring it to the recycle unit where we live. 

5 hours ago, Doska St. said:

Thank you, Corrie, for your response and your situation on this topic. Sorry if Google doesn't translate everything correctly.💝

Doska, most of the time Google translate adequately and for me German is no problem because my daughter has lived in Switzerland for more as 20 years. She married there and her husband and my grandkids are Swiss. Just before the start of the pandemic the family moved to the USA.

On 4/22/2024 at 12:05 PM, Doska St. said:

Hi all,

only just discovered this discussion.
I'm still too much of a beginner for PSP to be able to recommend anything, but I've been scrapbooking long enough to know the drill.

I started in 2005 and have heard that it is a separate industry in the USA. And that there are several styles. We in Europe scrapbooked the photorealistic 3D style back then. So we cut out parts from photos and pictures as deco (of course in compliance with copyright law, which is particularly strict in Germany). But fashions also change in the Scraobbook. Now more 2D, comic style or multimedia mix is popular. Lots of good tips have already been given here for a physical book.

I have another thought that's bothering me right now. When writing a will today, you also have to include the digital data on your own computers in a will so that heirs can then deregister digital registrations in banks, insurance companies, forums, social media, etc. But what do I do with my external drives full of digitally purchased kits that have cost me a lot of money in total and over the years of purchase. How do I pass this on? The money is too good for me to delete because it could be used by an heir who is interested in it. I also see it as a destruction of artistic works if it were simply deleted.
Of course it will also depend on the laws of the country we come from, but have you thought about what will happen to your scrap treasures after your transition? Or maybe you already have experience on how to handle this? What the heirs then do with it is of course their own business, and this also applies to private photos that they cannot do anything with. We don't have any direct heirs, but we have a good connection to other younger relatives. I'll talk to them soon about... this scrap thing. I have a younger sister-in-law who is also very talented in art and works with digital self-expression, she plots and has a digital shop.

I'm interested in your answers.

 

Hi Doska, I just see this now and it is an interesting subject. In the Netherlands you can make an appendix to your will with all your digital accounts. Your heirs, or a trustee that will execute your will, can deregister from all your accounts. However I don't know yet what I will do with all my accumulated supplies. Maybe one of my granddaughters will become interested, she has artistic potential and is following art classes but at this point is still to young. Hopefully I will live long enough that I can pass it to her one day. Otherwise I have no idea.

Well I can better answer this question before I forget to do so. Again I have no pictures of layouts about this topic, but I can write a short story. I have told before that I grew up in the postwar years in Rotterdam. That period was, certainly in the first years of my life, still a period of sparseness and hard working families. I luckily wasn't very picky about food, but disliked (or I should say hated) rice. Every time that came on the table I flatly refused to eat it and that always provoked a speech from my parents about the hunger they endured in the last year of the war where they had to eat tulip bulbs to stay alive! It has taken me more than 50 years to overcome my dislike of rice, nowadays I will eat it but it never will be a favorite of mine! 

The best memories about food I have of my dad baking pancakes or apple pie. He had learned backing from his older sister and liked to bake, which my mam didn't. My mam was born in the wrong era, had she lived now she probably would have made a nice career for herself and it wouldn't be that of a housewife! I think she was unhappy in that role, however she loved my dad.  

When I was in California with my family I unintentionally happened to have a little card of Markus with me. I have a little backpack that I often use for a small trip or just for a walk to store a couple of things like my phone and sunglasses. I thought it was empty but Markus was in there and when I checked what the theme of the month May was, I decided to take a picture of the pool and a picture of Markus. I made a sort of holiday card out of it all with a couple of elements I have in my stash. Like Markus: enjoy!

8 hours ago, Ann Seeber said:

Corrie, I love the layout and the collection. Just wondering, did your granddaughter mention how often to water a cactus? I've not had good luck with them...

Thank you Ann! The trick is to water very sparsely, the most common fault in watering a cactus is: you give them to much water. When in a pot or container you should let the soil dry out completely before giving them a drop. To this rule are some exemptions for certain species but that is normally on the label when you buy them. It is so funny to see her with her plants because my son, her uncle is also a great fan of cacti and he started with them when he was the same age as she is now. At 50 he still grows cacti but I'm not sure his wife loves those too.

I promised my granddaughter that I would make here a layout when I had overcome the jetlag and this is what I made for her. She loves plants, especially cacti and succulents, and she has quite a collection of them as mini plants. Besides that, green is her favorite color. I used the mask from Jessica Dunn for the May mask challenge on digital scrapbook and the papers (with blendmodes) and elements from cpjess Meadow bundle which I recently bought and some plant tubes. In the mean time I have transferred and ordered all my recent photos, so now I can start making a couple of layouts as intro pages for the photo album I'm going to make. Slowly I'm getting back into scrapping, it always takes some time to readjust to my normal routine at home.

N = Number of laps that you want to do

Well I am in too, hopefully I will have time enough to follow along. I want to make a photo album about my visit to California too but if I don’t take on other things at the same time it will be doable. It will be nice to get into scrapping again which I missed during my  “holiday“ .

E = Enjoy pool life

32 minutes ago, Ann Seeber said:

Welcome back, Corrie! So glad you got to experience Yellowstone, it is one of our Wonders! 

Thank you Ann, but I visited Yosemite, which is doable from the San Francisco Bay area for a weekend. Yellowstone is on my wishlist, maybe some other time in the future; who knows.