Susan Ewart

20 hours ago, Corrie Kinkel said:

You see there are and we have different European geese as well, but they are threatened by the Canadians.

I wonder how they got there.  I was shocked to see you had pictures of them.  They do love the farm fields.  When i lived in British Columbia there was farm fields around my house and they spent their nights there.  But hey, free fertilizer for the farmers.  We used to go the little park with a small pond and counted over 800 one night as they were taking off.  When they were up on the grass part of the park you could just walk amongst them.  I miss that park, I only see a few geese here and there where I live now.  I know the farmers dont feel the same.  And I get that it's not good to have an invasive species as it upsets the balance in the areas they shouldn't be in.  It's like the starlings that were brought to Canada.  

16 minutes ago, Ann Seeber said:

I love this topic. At last count, my Amazon Kindle has over 90 books in my cloud. I do like that I can accumulate books without taking up space here in my small condo.  I might even have some old layouts to display while I come up with something new. Here's one from the topic Hobbies back in 2021.

I love this layout.  The quote and the images backing it up are so fitting.  90 books would take up a lot of room if they were physical.  My hubby watches techy shows on Youtube and I happen to be in the same room one day while he was watch one.  I  had always wondered about "The Cloud".  what is it?  Is it floating around in the cyber sky, on a fluffy white cyber-cloud? Then the host of the show he was watching says:  :There is no cloud, only your files on the someone else's computer."  hahahaha, I never thought of it that way.  I liked the mystery of my info happily floating along on a fluffy cloud (the cloud is smiling of course).  

18 hours ago, Michele said:

I love how you blended the pictures with the text being the divider. Very creative.

Thank you so much Michele.  I wish I could take credit for the design but I saw it on a website somewhere.  The trick was to kern the letters to make sure they all touched.  I like the look.  It's great for things like; Happy Birthday, Congratulations etc and I made the the upper and lower layers mask groups.  

So far so good for me.

10 hours ago, Cassel said:

They are not beaten yet. So far, things are working while I have my caching/security service on pause. I will keep it like that for a few more hours and re-enable it tonight or tomorrow and see. At least, it won't affect the Q&A for tomorrow!

Oh wow, sound like a nightmare to me.  Good luck.  I'll be at the Q&A tomorrow

4 hours ago, Michele said:

I'm in. I did last year's workshop, but I still have a tough time with vectors.

Me too.  During the class you feel like, "Oh ya, I got this".....then weeks later, you are like,  "Vector, what's a vector?"

Great to be back to posting.  This was the post I tried to post on June 6th.  so glad is stayed on the Editor...and good thing it didnt post because I forgot to add a shadow the Weel Done and the frame.  I had looked on "professor" Google to see what do Scottish people say for "congratulations" and it came up with a slang term, "Weel Done".  I have no idea if this is legit or not.

Just a quickie I did tonight...because I left it to the last moment.  My friends moved to Scotland on the Moray Firth (Moray Coast?) in Nairn (close to Inverness).  Tomorrow (from my point of view - Today from theirs) they get the keys to the new house and their new adventure.  I had originally thought I'd be doing something with the text and the outer frame, but it seems to look better in black.  I found the highland cow on Unsplash (Sasha Matic is the photographer) and since it was on a snowy white background I used the Darken blend mode to made the background disappear into the garage door.  

I found the highland cow in the circle frame on Creative Fabrica and used text on a path as shown in the last master class.  I see that I didnt get the bottom word as far away.  I'll fix that later, I need to send it now as they should be just about getting up for the day...as I'm about to be going to sleep.   I am showing it in black (as it came), on the layout I turned it to white so it would show up.  

14 hours ago, Sue Thomas said:

What do you think?  Initially I didn't add shadows, which makes it look better.  If you ask me, I'm still not overlly happy with it.  

 

 

Wow!  this is cool.  It really looks rounded.  

I'm in.  Thank you for the extras too!

8 hours ago, Sue Thomas said:

I'm up to date with  my cards, also some of my Xmas cards for 2024.   I'm back on the Xmas cards and  general festive  creations which I can add to cards.   Here is a Xmas wordart candle, I started last night.  The flame is from CF,  a selection of  fonts and a base I made using a vector shape, and the pen tool.  It will easy enough to change colours to adapt to  any card.

 

So cool!  I love it.

Week 22

I didnt have a joker card and the joker in the round cards I use for the magnet element was hideous so I made one if each (card and magnet).  I duplicated the text for the opposite corner. You'd all have a good laugh watching me try and wrap my head around the correct sequence: flip this, mirror that...argh, that's not right.  Must've done it 10 times, when it should only take two moves.

5 hours ago, Sharla said:

Week 22 I came across a few of these flowers in the woods where I often walk. I’d never seen them before so had to look them up. It is apparently a Lilium pyrenaicum / Pyrenean Lily.

What a pretty flower Sharla.  Mother Nature makes the best color palettes

On 5/31/2024 at 5:58 AM, Michele said:

@Doska St. A kindred spirit ~ I'm a font-a-holic, too!

@Jeni Simpson I use the Image Information to keep track of what I do.

Great idea!

On 5/29/2024 at 1:13 PM, Peggy Dyar said:

@kasanyShe seems to at least like sitting in the driver's seat Pretending to drive! She cracks me up (she also has to "inspect" the water running into the toilet tank as if she's making sure all the parts are working correctly. I have to say - she entertains herself pretty good (I'm just here to move the car seat forward and take the lid off of and put it back on the tank). Oh yeah - and for food :-)LOVE Her.

One of my cats is obsessed with watching the toilet flush. A previous cat I had could flush the toilet. 

7 hours ago, Mary Solaas said:

Well, I did go back and finish the 1st attempt.  The multiple diamonds background I added the halftone effect; the brad is mine and the chain is a picture tube; the font is from Marissa Lerrin and I placed a background behind it as a frame and it is textured with bark texture; the Title font is Adventure Island SansBold and the journal font is Mongolian Baiti.  I assume that both fonts came from Creative Fabrica since that is where almost all my extra fonts come from.

Wow Mary, you are on a roll.  Send me some of your Mojo, please!

What week does May go up to.  I see only 19, 20 and 21 so far.  Is week 22 part of May?

And Week 21

...with a slipped in photo.  You'll see that look again in Wk 24.

Week 20

I'm on a roll.

Week 19

I'm finally back to some PSP time.  Playing catch-up as usual. This jpg is darker than the .pspimage file.  bummer.  There is more color in the original and the date and week number is meant to be subtle but not this subtle.  

7 hours ago, Corrie Kinkel said:

This week was all about saying goodbye to our car. As some of you know I can't drive anymore due to my eye condition and now my husband quits driving too. For him it was a tough decision and we had a lot of difficult conversations about it but I'm so glad he does quit. The last couple of years we had some near miss accidents and I  was in constant fear that one of these days it would turn out to be a serious accident! Our car was already a rather old one, so we were glad the garage  that does the maintenance was interested and bought it. On Wednesday afternoon we brought the car and went home on foot; it's only 15 minutes at the most. Now we have the whole summer to get used to the fact that we have to use bike, bus or train. In the Netherlands that is not a problem, we live 5 minutes from the train station and in 8 minutes we are in the city that has all the amenities like a hospital that our village doesn't have. I had to make a photo of our trusted companion of the last 8 years; it is parked on the parking spot behind our house.

I think it's one of the hardest decisions to make Corrie.  Driving offers such independence and it's hard to give that up.  Your both sound very reasonable about why it was time to stop driving.  You are lucky to have such good transportation nearby.    

1 hour ago, Anne Lamp said:

I live in a good old neighborhood. A few years ago we are pretty sure a house a few doors down was being used to sell drugs but nothing bad ever happened.  There is no way anyone would have as many short time visitors as there was there.  I know it was reported to the police and the visits finally stopped so I guess they had a little "talk" with the owner.

And it's so obvious, what they are doing.  You'd think drug dealers would want to be more inconspicuous.  and now having home-pick up service.  I had a manager once who, on her days off, worked at her friends "farm".  Then we hired someone and she recognized the manager as the "drug lady" in the area (where you could go buy drugs).  We never told her we knew, we let her go on telling us she worked at the "farm" on such and such day.  Was hard not to look at my co-worker and not laugh.    

1 hour ago, Corrie Kinkel said:

I live in a fairly large village and there are incidents happing throughout the village. Like houses set to fire to settle an argument, criminal related of course, drug problems, problems with addicted persons, shootings once in a while. Luckily we never had such serious things going on in the street were live. However circa 15 years ago, in our old house, we had a neighbor  who had a nephew that was a drugaddict, convicted for petty crimes and homeless, so he took him in. That started the problems because that nephew had friends that were the same as he was and they gathered in the front yard where they openly used drugs, fighting amongst each other, lots of yelling and they started selling drugs to schoolboys. Of course I spoke to my neighbor but he was unable to stop it. At one point, in the backyard under the covering they made a fire on the barbecue and put grass and old clothes on it and left it unattended. My husband was seriously ill and just home after 3 weeks in hospital, unable to do anything; every time I came home I had to pass those guys and had to ask, or command them to remove their bikes that were blocking our garagedoor. I had spoken to the police before and they talked with my neighbor, which didn't help. So now I called the police again because I was really scared they would set fire to the whole block of houses and this time they came to investigate and interview us about the situation. That helped, my neighbor had to come to the police station to get his nephew out. That guy was put in a closed institution for a while, but later when he was out again and visited his uncle I was frightened that the whole story would start all over. Since 7 years we live in another house in a very quiet street and until now. nothing has happened

It's sad that we cant even feel safe in our own homes.  When I lived in another province, there was a lot of home invasions happening, mostly to elderly and some elderly were beaten and some were beaten so badly they passed away from the injuries.  I was in my late 30's and even I felt scared to be alone in my own home, or to answer the door bell.  In some of the invasions, they just busted the door in and went in demanding money.  Does it seem that in current times it's somewhat worse because we have to be tolerant of so many things.  In British Columbia (where I lived before), they recently made all drugs legal (I think the federal govt did that there as a test to see if it would make fewer drug addicts and crime because of the addiction).  Now the BC govt is asking this new law to repealed because the situation got worse not better.  It's like adding fire to fire to put it out.  

Corrie, that's a scary situation to be in.  people on drugs are so unpredictable.  Just last week in Edmonton a young 16 yr boy was walking their dog with his mother and a homeless man they've seen many times, jumped out of the bush and stabbed the young boy in the neck, he passed away at the scene.  They think he had some kind of drug related "episode", thankfully he has been deemed fit for trial.  It makes you want to go live far away from people.  The older I get the more I am aware of situations like that and how helpless I probably am to do anything about it.  

We moved into a brand new house on the wrong side of town (unknown to us at the time).  Very quickly we found out across the street and two houses down was a drug house (rental).  One weekend we saw over 100 people come and go and even had drug deals going down right outside our front door.  It was getting worse and worse and we figured it was only time before we would be broken into.  So we put the house up for sale and bought one in a better part of town.  People were coming to look at the other house right when the police came to bust the house and the utility company came to shut off the gas and electricity.  The potential buyers took one look at what was going down and didn't even get out of the car.  

Worse was my friend here in Edmonton (who've now just moved to Scotland), lived in a high end townhouse (2 level) condo complex.  The city decided to buy a unit and house a homeless person in it (for free, or rather on the tax payers money).  This homeless person quickly turned the unit into a chop shop for stolen bicycles, stolen goods as well as being a  drug supplier to the street people that flocked to the unit.  The tenant would freely past his key fob out to any street person and there was no end of people coming and going from the unit often over 20 people in the unit.  All the residents had something stolen from the underground parking and storage lockers.  the residents feared taking their garbage to the dumpster as there was often very sketchy, scary people coming there to buy drugs.   Many complaints and letters to the city later, and a smashed bottle over someone's head,  the city is finally taking it to court, as it's very hard to evict someone, even if they are engaging in criminal activity.  The residents were told to take pictures for the court case.  It's been very stressful and scary for the residents as these street people are very unpredictable.  

It's sad for the original owners who are the victims.  I sure hope they are able to bring charges to the people that did this.  

57 minutes ago, Sue Thomas said:

After reading the latest blog post about using a split page, I downloaded one of the templates, and came up with this.  Organza ribbon, (used Carole's bow script), paper bow. Banner from the  masterclass.  I was fortunate enough yesterday to witness these two 5-6 week old ground squirrels emerge from their undergound nursery for the very first time. They were so tiny, one  would fit comfortably in the palm of my hand.  Unfortunately, that wasn't likey to happen.

Oh, they are adorable.  

2 minutes ago, Bonnie Ballentine said:

Thank you, Ann. One of my favorites too...we must be twins!

I think you are twins...I have a hard time telling you apart...🤣   You both have a hat on and you both wear glasses, totally twins!