Altered chocolate box

Once the chocs are eaten the box often gets thrown away or put in the recycling but this one was such a useful size - it holds 2 stacks of 6 or 7 cds, I decided to collage it up a bit and use it to store my cds of vintage images and collage sheets etc.

I covered it with some K & Co Vintage themed scrapbook paper of old envelopes and postcards, then added 2 rubber stamped vintage images from The Stampsmith and an altered slide mount, then trimmed the edge with a scrap of old lace.

I think it looks really vintagey yet it sits next to my pc and doesn't look out of place.

New Scrapbook page

Its quite cold today but we did manage to spend an hour or so in the garden, cutting back some shrubs and trees which has tidied up the back garden and surprised a few birds when they came down to my seed feeder to find half the tree they sit in, gone!

Doing a bit of hard graft has made me feel justified in spending the remains of the afternoon indoors, on my computer making a few scrapbook pages.

The other day I downloaded the excellent free photo editing programme Paint.net and am learning how to use that to make scrapbook pages and digital collages. I'm not very Au Fait with it yet but have managed to make one or two.

I cheated a little with this one by using a gorgeous ready made quickpage by Pam Lefors Designs and just added a couple of images.

The pictures I used are of really poor quality. They were taken over 30 years ago on a really cheap and tacky camera. Since then they were stuck in a non acid free album which faded and damaged them. I came across them and even though they're so poor they are the only photos I have of my little dog Ben who died a few weeks after these photos were taken.

Even though he was just a baby when he died and spend just a few short months with me so many many years ago, I have never forgotten my lovely sweet baby Ben.

This way a few more people can share him.

He was a miniature long haired dachsund and the big white dog was his best friend whose name was Hypo and belonged to a neighbour. Even though Ben was so tiny he could sit in the palm of my hand he was a feisty little chap and used to run this big puppy ragged, jumping all over him and showing him who was boss.

I hope you like the scrapbook page.

Digital collage

Here are a couple of simple vintage collage pictures I've made today on my computer.

I love messing about with collage and using vintage images but as the house is all nice and tidy for Christmas and my DH wants it to stay that way I decided to have a dabble with digital collage. I'm not very good at it yet but I enjoyed having a go... What do you think of them?

I've been playing around with my Scrapbook flair software and some free digital scrapbooking backgrounds and embellishments from Simply clean digi scraps , and a Vintage photo I tinted.

There are lots of lovely free digital scrapbooking backgrounds and kits to get you started if you fancy having a go and you can find some of them by clicking this link Digital Scrapbooking Freebies