Doodling

I've been having flu like symptoms, the past couple of days and spent most of Sunday in bed. I am going for my flu shot on Wednesday, lot good that does me if I've got the flu now.

I did make it through work today.

A few doodle tags....

I never really liked fairies growing up. The whole princess phase that young girls go through sort of totally missed me. And fairies like Tinkerbell just seemed very whimpy. It wasn't until later when you get into the Celtic Legends that Fairies become down right EVIL that I started really enjoying the whole faye universe.



The Fairy is this is from the uncredited Fantasy Freebie I got of digifree. I dolled her up with the Glittered Blossoms freebie kit from Creations by Jo, more because I wanted to play with the kit than for any other reason. Playing with the kit is a good reason, right?



The Fairy in this one came from the Shadow Fairies freebie from Efie. The Unicorn is from a freebie from Grafix4All, (which blogger now says has been removed?).

I used the Autumn Breeze kit from Creations by Jo on this one. Now do I stay with the kit, or unicorn...hmmm....



I didn't like this one when I did it, but since changed my mind. I call it Dark Unicorn, for obvious reason. The unicorn is from the same source as above, while I used Yarrow's Gothique Rouge to do the background stuff with.



And finally, the only tube tag in the set is my Thank Ewe tag, which I'm sure I'll have some use for over the thanksgiving season. The Ewe tube is from Krissy's Scraps (as shown in the copyright) and the background kit is Autumn Breeze from Creations by Jo. I really like the autumn colors, in case you haven't notices. You can get the tube off her blog, I don't know if it's on Designer Scraps or not.

Anyway, I'm feeling dizzy again now, so I think I shall take myself back to bed. Thanks for visiting!

Midnight Monday

I was thinking of doing a collection of House Panther for this Thursday's T-13. I already have three (well four if you count Diamond) done. Here are a few more.

This first one I used on House Panthers for Stygia Sunday and as I'd already done one of Stygia last week, I didn't feel I should do another one.



This is uses the Dark Gothic taggers kits by Creations by Jo, combined with the Bone Alpha from Free Digital Scrapbooking. Stygia was getting her but nipped in the shot by her tabby sister, but I cropped that part out. :)



Mickey just turned 15 I think, not quite old enough to drive. He's still going strong though for a senior cat. Here he is lounging in one of the windows of Castle Diamond, the only place to be during the Howl-N-Scream season.

I used the Dusk Till Dawn kit from Scrappy Redhead combined with the Nettie B Scrapz Brushed Metal Alpha.

Tillie is Michey's little sister and she's ready for a night of dancing under the stars.



I used the Dancing in the Dark mini-kit by Scrappy Redhead, which is a freebie you can pick up at Scrap Happiness. The heart from however is from her Purple Passion Add-on. I like the inclusion of the fireflies, it's a nice change from dragonflies and butterflies. The Black Gold Alpha was a freebie from Bizee Digital Arts and is a bit of a nightmare as it came with two upper case Y but no lower case, and the upper case Z looks exactly like the upper case B.

I haven't done much with Batman so he seemed ot be a good candidate for a tag. I used the Gothic Rouge kit from Yarrow for this one, but the Batman ring comes for the compliled Halloween 3 kit from Efie. The theme for that kit was bats and she put every little bat thing she could dig up into it.



On a side note, Chaos Priestess is retiring, at least for a while, and as a result, all her kits are on major sale at Digital Chaos. While I'm happy for the sale, with pay day right around the corner, I'm not happy to see her retire, as she was one of my favorite designers.

A Pair of pairings

After due consideration, and taking into account that Minutes to Midnight was a taggers sized kit, I redid the pieces in 5 xy 7 format to print for my sister. She gets a kick out of Diamond, she thinks she's adorable.





Yes, Tris is holding the key to Diamond's heart but we had a minor scrimmage earlier this evening, so I don't think he'll be unlocking it anytime soon.

Meanwhile, Scrappy Redhead put out a new kit called Midnight Acquaintance and as always, the blues drew me in. That and the "butterfly" that kind of looks like a super chicken logo. I got the full sized kit, so both these pieces were done to 8 x 10.





This is a stand alone 5 x 7 that I did of Diamond using the same kit.



The nice thing about this is that if you buy it before the end of the September, you can download the September Collaboration kit from Scrap Happy for free. So you're basically getting two kits for the price of one, and one of those kits is supersized.

If you scroll down to the bottom of Scrap Happy, there's a couple of Mini-freebies from Scrappy Redhead as well, so it's worth the visit.

Switching back to the Halloween theme again....



Spider Cat, spider cat, does whatever a spider cat can...

This uses Gothik Vampire from Tizzy's Angel (of course!)

Anyway, that about wraps it up for me for tonight. For some reason I'm just really, really tired, so believe I will turn in early. ::yawn::

(I know, I know, I need something for Blue Wednesday in case Not the Mama can't do it...)

Diamond & Tris

With fall moving in, I needed to do something autumny for Miss Diamond's blog, and to be honest, the fall colors suit Tristan very well.





Both of these pieces use the Autumn Breeze kit from Creations by Jo. In the first one, I supplimented the kit with elements from the Autumn Forest Friends set from Danielle Engebretson and which is available at Digital Freebies.

In the second, I used the Cork Alpha which was created by Claudi and which is also available at Digital Freebies. The little leaf buttons are from the Canada kit that I got from Scrappin' Girls (I think), I needed a brad or something and this just sort of went with the overall fall theme.

Today is new release Tuesday over at Digital Freebies. Don't forget to check out the DF Blog, where they have two freebies available for today, including an add on to Melanie Ann's To the Moon kit.

Speaking of freebies, Diane over at Candy's Treats has retired her Metallic kit and is offering is a Freebie. It's a great chance to pick up a nice little kit with alot of pieces for free. While she says it's not as good as some of her newer stuff, it's still pretty descent.

Yarrow has put together a new 2-in-one kit called Opposites Attract. She has an add-on freebie on her blog and it probably has many pieces in it as some full sized kits do, so it's worth snagging.
I thought I'd mention it because I almost used it for these next two pieces, but I felt like working more in black and white so I put that idea on the back burner and used her Minutes to Midnight kit instead.





I was contemplating doing matching pieces using her freebie Birthday Wishes kit for my sister's birthday on Saturday, but I've decided to trash that idea in favor of sending her matching 8x10 of my fursons using the Minutes to Midnight kit. I'm going to redo a piece for Diamond though to make it more like, but opposite, the one for Tris, so the overall theme is the same, but swap out the colors. For example, Tris is a light frame on a dark background, her's will be a dark frame on a light background.

Finally a new store called Moki Joe Designs is opening up to help raise money for Moki the cat's Medical Fun. Not much there right now but you might want to bookmark it and keep an eye on it.

The Eyes have it

I had a moment of giddy excitement at work on Friday when I ran across a free 30-day downloadable trial version of PSP X2. When I got home and looked it up - and read the technical specifications, my poor little heart crashed. It - much like PS CS2 requires either XP or Vista, and I'm still running Win 2000. (And believe me, I remember when that was state of the art!) ::sigh::

So we're stuck with my moldy old version of Photoshop (5.0). One for the Books did not have any Photoshop manuals either, although they did have a small selection of old computer related technical manuals, including PSP 8 to choose from. "We'd take anything for Photoshop," the girl told me, "but no one ever brings anything in."

Oh well. I did download a few more kits today but I'll get to that as I get to them. Right now I want to share some tags for some expressively eyed cats on the Cat BlogoSphere.



Theo has some really expressive eyes and he's obviously seeing some thing he just can't believe in his Howl-N-scream tag. What next he wonders? This used the Fright Night kit from Creations by Jo. Three of the next kits I just purchased came from Creations by Jo, which prompted me to find her blog. The extra bits in the kit - the ghosts and the black cat - where from the Mini Halloween Scrap Pack freebie from Kristen's Wicked Scraps.

The Black Epoxy lettering on this one, and the Bloody Mess lettering on the next two tags were from Free Digital Scrapbooking.



Yao-Lin does not strike me as the sort of feline to be afraid of anything. I mean, he lives with the Stinky Baby Mao, everything must seem pretty tame after that. But he obviously sees something out there that's not to his liking. This also used the Fright Night kit from Creations by Jo.



Kellie the Orange Cat was out trick or treating when she heard something and now she's not so sure she want to go knock on the door of that haunted mansion behind her. Perhaps it was the moaning of the wind, but then...could it also have been...oh my....

This used the Night of the Dead kit by Chaos Priestess.

I think - and I don't think this will be a problem - I'll do a T-13 with these tags on Miss Diamond's blog on Thursday. I'm working on setting up a new blog for my new Tabby Cat, Trisan, who is cowering under the bed despite the fact the demon cat from hell is somewhere outside.

Tag, you're it

I think I'm having a moment of revelation here. "Tagging" seems to be taking the work of an artist, usually a sensual female or something similar, and decorating it with scrap book pieces. I find a lot of redundancy in the scrap book kits and that probably because most of the kits are compiled from stock art that's been colored or modified in some way. Atomic Cafe and several other places also provide "scrips" or "actions" which help the scrap kit designs in creating something for their kit. This is probably why so many designs keep using the same tired old dragonflies and emo skulls and (yes butterflies and flowers). One of the reasons I like the kits that Kathy Haworth (Tizzy's Angel) puts together is that they're different. She uses a lot of her own photography in designing her pieces. She doesn't compile so much as she creates.

"Taggers" often purchase stock art in the form of PSP tubes to use as the center piece of their tags. Some of this stock art is photography.

I guess I see no difference then, in using photos of cats to create my tags, and if it came down to that, I could probably do my own artwork as well, as judging from some of the "tubes" I was looking at, I'm a better artist.

In any case, a few new tags:



Momo lives down under and she's actually a very beautiful and colorful cat. I faded her out for this pieces as I was trying to make her look a bit "ghostly". I used the Gothik Vampyre kit by Tizzy's Angel for this one, it's really one of the nicer Halloween kits that has come out.



Poor Pumpkin, she always gets made into a pie around this time of year. Here she's begging for Candy Corn instead. This was done using the Spookable kit from Honored Scraps. It's a just a quick little piece that isn't meant to be be really spooky. Notice however the candle...

Now, skip on over HERE and have a look at the one in this layout of Miss Diamond. The kit I used on this was Gothic Rougue by Yarrow. Same candle, different colors. Although I think the designers in Digital Chaos share around more than most. I still like their work however.



I mentioned the harvest moon element in the Night of the Dead kit. Well, here it is in a tag for Little Isis. This was actually a pretty easy job to do as Isis was in silhouette in the shot.

Finally, not really a tag, this was done to 8 x 10 size and is from Yarrow's A Pirate's Life kit, which I like quite a bit. (I liked it better before I noticed it shared a lot of elements with Bluedream Designs' work. Oh well.)



I love Diego by the way, I think he's a great cat and this worked well for Meow like a Pirate day as well as Fluffy Friday on House Panthers.

It was a dark and stormy night...

More Halloween fun...I love this stuff, I really do...



She was sitting around "menacing" T.C. Her presence in the room is enough to menace T.C., even when she's not paying attention to him. So I snapped a picture. She looks just spooktacular, don't you think?

I used the Spookable kit from Honored scraps on this one. Cute little kit, but not as much fun as I was hoping it would be.



Stygia is one of the new house panthers on the scene. He's been doing Stygian Saturdays. You can find him at T'Abby Normal and Stygian Panther.

I used Fright Night from Creations by Jo. She's got a few dark kits, but she'd borderline goth at best. Nothing really hard core. This is a cute little kit that has possibilities, and is a little bit more spookier than Spookable.



Not all Halloween cats need to be black. A pumpkin tabby works just as well. This is Moe from Team Tabby who seems to be a VERY unthreatening cat.

I used Chaos Priestess Night of the Dead kit, which I just realized, as I was working on this piece, has a harvest moon element in it. Now I'll have to do something with that. And I think I know just the thing...

It actually IS a dark and stormy night out tonight and is raining down cats and dogs to go with the lightning and thunder, so I'm guessing I should get off the computer now. All these kits can be found at Digital Chaos. There's a blinkie on the right side of the page for the store. Use it, and have fun!

Some Enchanted Evening

Chaos Priestess has been a very busy girl and has come up with a number of new tagger sized kits - and mini add-ons for each - which are now available Digital Chaos.

Enchanted Night, Magikal Worker, Natural Magik, Love Is are all new. Also available is Wiccan Pride, Purple Glory, Thinking Pink and Feeling Blue. A total of 36 tagger sized add-ons are currently available for free - and no, you don't have to buy anything to get them!

I just downloaded a bunch this evening, and while I've not had the chance to play with them yet, it's largely because I wanted to work with one of Yarrow's new kits, called Minutes to Midnight. This is an absolutely beautiful Cinderella themed kit and - OH Yes - there is a Freebie Add-On so you can try it before you buy it.



Tonight, Miss Diamond wishes to share with us the story of how a little wild kitty became a feline princess. Hey...if they shoe fits...

On a slightly more mundane use, I did take it out to the ballgame:



While I'd like to snag the full versions of several of Chaos Priestess newest offerings, it will have to wait until my next paycheck. I've already overspent on this one - but hey I got some really cool stuff with it!

In the meantime, I have the Add-ons to play with!

Floral Forest Fantasy

The latest kit from Tizzy Made Me Do this is Floral Forest Fantasy which you can get at Digital Chaos.

Diamond is of course, very fond of flowers. She loves to munch on any I bring into the house. In his first piece, she is will some of her Autumn Forest Friends which were done by Danielle Engebretson and which can be found at Digital Freebies.



Since I was afraid she might eat her friends, being the mighty huntress she is, I made her stay in a frame for that one.

In this one, she's out of the frame and having fun playing hide and seek in the forest.



My Grams very much like flowers too, so I sent her off into to woods to enjoy them as well.



There is a Freebie Add On for it. This last pieces was done using just the add on:



Much fun! Well, I suppose I must go and do laundry now. I've procrastinated enough for one day.

Midnight in the Garden

Designs by Helly had a freebie sampler up on Digi-free for her Hard Rock Mama kit. You know me, I'm into anything Rock and Roll, and this is actually a pretty cool little kit. But I was wondering what the full kit looked like so I followed the link over Scrapping Whispers where I also found a very nice little kit called Midnight in the Garden.

I particually liked the little fairies, but here's the rub. It's mostly black on black so you can't see a lot of things once you try to put them together.

Unhappy with my initial results, I started putting together a hybrid piece using the Gothic Envy kit and the Dark Elegance kit, which was a freebie.



Halfway through this piece is when it occurred to me to add a glow to the elements. Photo suite doesn't do glow every well, BTW, but...



So then I went back and reworked the Diamond in the Moonlight Garden piece, with much better resuls. I'll get the hang of this sooner or later.

Anyway, Helly's got some nice kits although I'm not sure what I'd do with some of them. Maybe something will occur to me eventually, but the Hard Rock Mama and the Midnight in the Garden kit I've found quite amusing.

I would love to play with this some more tonight, but we once again have a 10:00 AM game (bleck!) so I believe I'll head off to bed now.

Moonkist

Diamond will tell you that today is a Special Black Cat Holiday. I only know that if I do not get the Special Black Cat her Special food she will probably eat me for dinner tonight.

This layout was done with the Moonkist Freebie from Kristy's Scraps. I love the look of this kit.

On a similar note, Tizzy's Angel has a new taggers kit called A Moonlit Night available at Digital Chaos. This might be the best kit she's done to date. It's very rich. Check it out!

There's also a free Moonlit Night Add-On to go with it. And it's never to early for a Friday Freebie, now is it?

Mooncat

This is a rework of the tag attempt from the middle of May. I was trying for an effect where she's coming out of the frame but I think I messed up, because the tip of the ribbon on the right is cut off. Still it's not a total waste and I kind of like it.

We had Mommy-Monster weekend as my mother was either drinking, doing drugs or had run out of lithium, but she was in major mood swings. Now I know where my sister gets her viperous tongue from. As a result everything I was working on was kind of dark and moody. Even the rather whimsical Cole subdues a Dragon piece, which I need to rework, it kind of dark.

As with the earlier piece, this uses the Gothic Envy tagger Kit from Digital Chaos. The Metal Alpha is from NettieB Scraps.

Diamonds and Satin

My little princess, all pretty in purple. This uses the Satin Grunge and Satin Grunge Add On by Tizzy's Angel and it's available in the Digital Chaos store.

Beauty, isn't it?

Saturday pairing

A couple more from an earlier game. I still have to do new layouts for Alex Smit.



The open star charms from from American Charm by Marie LaFrance which is available at Digital Freebies. It was on the cut out list, but it seems they've repented and are going to continue to offer the full bundle. It's a good little kit, I've used it extensively.

The funny thing with Danny Dorn is that I'd seen him Saturday at Extended Spring Training, then he showed up Wednesday with the Reds. T.J. was sure I was crazy, but I wasn't.

I thought about printing these, but I'll wait until after three when Allen or Kenny are on duty at the lab. The regular crew takes care of me, so I like to make sure they get the commissions on the printing.

I've decided to forego both the extended game today and tryouts. My mother called this morning and well - it was the same old stuff, over and over. When I look for a little sympathy, I can't get it. This week she's mad at my sister. Next week, Carol will be her little angel again. I'm over it.

"One of these days I'll be gone and you won't be able to hear my voice anymore." That would almost be a blessing.

Call me when you're sober, Lady.

I think I'm going to do some shopping at Digital Chaos. I still need to put some blinkies on the sidebar, and with the addition of Henry Reyes and Mike Allen to the team, I have a few more Miracle layouts to do so I can get 'graphs when they get back home.

Tags

I joined the Chaos Angel forums because well, I like the goth look and figure some instruction would be a good thing. I am on the Retrodiva forum as well, but don't interact much - I'm there mostly for the challenges which I am probably light years away from winning because, well...as I've said before, I just don't know all that much.

Anyway the idea of TAGS came up and I'd forgotten about TAGS because most of the baseball forums I frequent don't used them. So...these are not really TAGS, but I guess they'll do until I get a bit more creative or until someone takes pity on me.

Back Ended

I told Eli I had a very nice picture of his back end but that I wouldn't embarrass him in front of his friends by making him sign it. (This does not mean I won't embarrass him by posting it on the internet.)

"Oh," he says. "What did you think of it?"

"Your back end?"

"Yeah."

"Nice. It's a VERY NICE back end," I tell him.

"I've been working on it," he says. As if all the girls in the stadium weren't in love with him anyway.

Better he should work on his batting.

Anyway, maybe because it was Mother's Day, it was a good day for Freebies including a great little add-on mini-kit for Rock Devil, which you can find at Fall Angel Scrapz. There were also some odd bits that that I think she was working on for that kit but that didn't get included, so she offered it as a freebie.

So, this layout has sort of been perking in the back of my head and became reality. I should send it to Eli's mom.

Anyway, the full Rock Devil kit is available at Digital Chaos and I really like the look, so I'll have to buy the whole thing. There are some other interesting things at that e-shop as well.

The alpha, the heart and I think the black ribbon are from Scrappin Dead Girls' My Guitar Hero kit.