My Time Made Easy: Sole-Mate & playing with digi paper!

Hey yall!  Welcome to My Time Made Easy's April Release!!  ALL new items are available in the store NOW! 🙂  Happy Shopping 😉  Ok, I have a couple of things to chat about with ya today, besides my project I'd like to show you a couple of things with Digital paper you may not have tried or thought of before.  First off, I used the Sole-Mate template to make this adorable show gift!!  Yall know how most girls have a MAJOR love affair with shoes, all kinds of shoes!  Did you know that you can Design Your Own Converse shoes?!?!  And since I am one that wants things MY WAY, I find this a fabulous thing!!!  I have my heart set on a pair of Pink with white polka dot 'sneaks', and since I can't buy my Converse yet I decided to make my gift here with the color scheme.  I knew I wanted to use some of our Burlap digi paper, but there wasn't the exact color I wanted… never fear, the Great SARA is here!  Sara walked me through recoloring the Burlap paper (no, clicking FILL is NOT how it's done! lol).  Sara did a little tutorial >here<, for recoloring digi paper.  Thanks to her UBER-easy, step-by-step directions I got busy!  Using GIMP (which is a FREE download), I started with the Yellow Burlap paper from this Garden Greats digi pack, I chose the color I wanted it to be and plugged in the RGB values and finished following Sara's directions.  VOILA!  I got the pink I wanted.  But I also wanted polka dots, so while still in GIMP, using BRUSHES I chose the size "dot" I wanted and selected WHITE on my color palette.  I could have chosen, hearts, flowers or many other shapes, but I wanted polka dots.  I didn't worry too much about making sure they were in a perfect position since I'd be cutting up my paper anyway.  I printed, and it looked PERFECT!  Exactly what I wanted!!  Now I continued with my template.

After cutting all of the pieces out I wanted to do a little "worn in" look.  I took some Antique Linen and Pumice Stone Distress Inks and some daubers and went to town!  The little label on the side is from the Sole-Mate stamp set.  Here I used my Silhouette to layer the images and cut them out, though the layering and printing could have been done through GIMP as well.  I added a little Pink Spica Glitter pen to her hair bow 🙂

For my card I wanted to use the same paper, but if I'd just printed it, the scale would have been much too big, plus I didn't need a whole sheet of this paper since my card is only 4.25" x 4.25".  Using GIMP once again, I scalled the paper down until the pattern was the size I wanted it, and then cropped it to the size I needed… a 4" x 4" square!  NO WASTED INK, NO WASTED PAPER!!  Now I've been on Lauren's Design Team for years, and it honestly just occured to me a handful of months ago to crop my digi paper to the size I need before printing!  The images on my card are also from the Sole-Mate stamp set.  Digital paper certainly has it's perks, most of which never occured to me until the last 6 months, lol!  If you have any questions on any of the digi stuff I did, please email me and I'll be happy to help you with what I can 🙂

Thanks for popping by, hope to see you soon!  and don't forget to visit the rest of the My Time design team…

Lauren Maeder 
Lisa Kind 
Debbie Marcinkiewicz 
Pattie Goldman 
Lori Kalus 
Farida Rone 
Lori Hairston 
Sara Williams 
Jackie Randolph 
Karien van der Westhuizen 
Tracy Holmes