Roberta's Ramblings

Ode to Menopause

Just Lucky I Guess

The weatherman was calling for storms on Friday and for a pretty Saturday and Sunday.  While I like pretty Saturdays and Sundays, I was hoping that we would get a break on Friday.  It's was my son's Semi-Formal and I was so wanted decent weather so that I could get a couple of photos of the kids.  Well, the weather was awesome and I took over 100 shots - so I'm happy.  My daughter stopped by after work in the last few minutes of taking pictures of the kids - so I nabbed one of her and her brother. Just lucky I guess - or perhaps those selfish prayers were answered...(click on the image for a larger preview).

Here is the original for comparison sake.  It wasn't the best photo I ever taken, that's for sure.

Thanks for stopping by!

Summer :)

Well, summer is beginning, although from the amount of rain that we've been getting lately - looks like Spring's going to be hanging for awhile.  We did get to enjoy some really nice weather on Memorial Day Weekend - and managed to get to the shore and enjoy the pool.

Thanks for stopping by.  Here are two layouts that I created from photos of the weekend.  Hope that you enjoy them.  I will be creating a page set and some quick pages from this set when I can find the time.

Have a great day!

Roberta

Service Magic - is it Magic?

Being a single mother and homeowner with a limited amount of time on my hands and things breaking on a fairly routine basis, I was looking for a sound way to get the services that I needed from competent professionals and to not really pay too much more than fair market value.  With this crappy economy, I'm sure you can understand.  Someone suggested Angie's list, but, I was not up for purchasing a service so that I could get some quotes for work for planning purposes - particularly because until I get the quotes I would not able to be sure just how much of the work I would be able to get done in this economy.  Thus enters Service Magic.

I stopped by the Service Magic website and registered.  There is no fee involved.  The first project that I entered was for landscaping services.  They contacted contractors in my area and had them reach out to me.  Three of them came by, looked at the property, and fairly quickly provided me with a quote.  I am getting a good value particularly when you compare to services that I have received in previous years when I did they research myself.

Now, the Power washing.  I think just two of the three vendors provided me with quotes on the services, but, after reading the previous customer reviews and being happy with the quotes, I was able to commit the job to one of the vendors.  Tom was just wonderful.  He power washed my house as well as all of the concrete around the home - including the pool areas.  You just can't believe the difference - so I'll show ya.  I took some pictures after he was done and then searched through some old photos to locate pictures of the same areas within the past two or so years.  So, they are not immediately before, just immediately after.  Chances are the dirty areas looked even worse after a couple of years had gone by.  Oh well, sorry Tom, I didn't think to take pictures right before.  Oh, and the photos are untouched.  I didn't take away the dirt with a photoshop brush, Tom took it away with a Power Wash wand.

Thought For the Day

He has filled them with skill to do all kinds of work as craftsmen, designers, embroiderers in blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen, and weavers—all of them master craftsmen and designers.

Exodus 35:35

May each of you get the opportunity to use your special skills and talents today.

It's been fun

Well, Rendered Memories opened in April of 2006 - and it was a whirlwind opening.  I decided about four days before opening to do my own store and I went for four days and nights without sleeping and was learning how to be a store owner the hard way  :).  But, it was a blast.  I got to be on the forefront of lots of changes, styles, and trends from digital paper tears, curved overlays, to actions that make elements from your own backgrounds.  I was rewarded handsomely for some of my contributions to the digiscrapping world and, honestly, it was this little shop that kept my head above water and allowed me to keep my home during my divorce - and for that I will be forever thankful and grateful to those of you that patronized my little part of the digital scrapbooking world.

However, personal circumstances along with the economy made it such that I needed a more stable second income than I was able to get with sales of digital scrap booking supplies.  That was the beginning of the end.  Working more hours I had less time to devote to my art, there was more competition than ever - partly due to new designers now having actions available to them (talk about slicing your own throat - ROFL), and there being less disposable income for just about everyone - there has been a steady and predictable decline in sales.   Unfortunately, it is no longer feasible for me to maintain a store as large as Rendered Memories as the costs can't be supported by the sales.

Therefore, I'm having a huge inventory reduction sale.  If there is something that you want, grab it up while you can.  I'm not sure how many products I will retain - if any.  I've got an email out to the company that does my web hosting to see what all kinds of plans they have available.  I'll decide on it in the next few months.  In the meantime, there are over 125 awesome products that are available for $2.00 - only through Memorial Day.

Stop by and check it out.  Also, thanks so much for your past patronage - it truly is appreciated.

Roberta

Some of the page sets you might want to check out:

Happy Mother's Day

Hope that you that celebrate had a Happy and Blessed Mother's Day. Those of you that don't celebrate it - hope that your day was equally as wonderful.  I've got a new page set out entitled "Mother" that can help you capturing and scrapping all of those memories.

This set is created with a beautiful pink and green color scheme with ivory and black accents.  There are five coordinating backgrounds that are 12 x 12 300 dpi.  In addition there are two beaded borders, four journal tags in the shape of ladies, a cameo, three tabs, a glittery title, two lines of stitching, and two photo clusters,  The photo clusters, stitching, and beading have drop shadows for realism.

For a limited time only, this set is selling at $3.00.  Hope that you stop by and check it out.

Happy Birthday Matthew

Matthew's Birthday fell on Easter again this year.  I've already shared a few of the photos that I took.  Here's is the layout that I did.

Happy Easter

What a Blessed Day. As I'm sure you are all aware, Easter was yesterday. I got a wonderful gift from God. First, fifteen years ago today - my dear son Matthew was born. Happy Birthday Matthew - I LOVE YOU. Today, fifteen years later, Matthew graced me with his presence in Church. How awesome! It was really nice to have him there. It meant a lot to me. Now we'll just have to work on Nicole :). Here's a few photos from the day.  

Those darned hard drives....

Well, as you can imagine, an external HD crash is no fun for anyone.  For a designer who was using her EHD as her HD - because her machine is pretty full - it was downright ugly.  Basically I just mostly have software on the HD of my poor 6 year old Mac that's pretty full, and I run it hard. The external HD holds my photos, page sets, layouts, and other stuff as well as serving as the scratch disc for most of my memory hogging graphics programs.  Did I have it backed up?  Some of it.  All of it?  No.  So, I wanted to recover as much of it as possible.   I got a few estimates, and most of them were well out of my reach.  Then I stumbled across Data Recovery NJ.  For those of you that are not in NJ (which I assume is most of you), the good news is that you can ship your HD to them and they will ship it back to you.  Well, I didn't think I'd like this options, so I drove it to them.  Interestingly enough, I did opt to have the brand spanking new HD shipped back to me.  It arrived in perfect condition....and all of my goodies were there.  How great is that?  I was thrilled.   He moved TONS of stuff from my non-functioning HD to a really cute and small Seagate 1T and it was all in the right folder, correct division, all as I had just seen it.  So if you are, unfortunately, having to deal with data recovery of a HD or EHD - I suggest that you give Larry at Data Recovery a hollar - he was very good to me and I am sure will be very good to you too!!

On to other stuff, now that I have my precious EHD and designing capabilities back, I've got a few things to share with you!  I did a couple of tuts on adding drop shadows to layouts:



That gives you an example of what drop shadows look like with different setting.  The next one was kind of a visual to help people understand how I decided which drop shadows to use when.  Not sure why anyone cared, but, I was asked - so I created the following:



The drop shadows of 3D objects (1) are different from those of 2D (2) objects.  The same drop shadow can appear fine on some backgrounds (2), too light on others (3&5), and too dark on yet others (4&6).  Drop shadows that are larger (Blessed and Lord) will make those objects appear to be standing out further than objects with smaller drop shadows (other text) and can give the appearance that something is wrong if you have objects that appear "further away" behind objects that appear "closer" (7).  I will probably need to bring the "Blessed" in front of the smaller text as it is just driving me crazy behind it  :).

Credits - Eggs and their dropshadows were created using the Egg Decorator Photoshop® Action from Rendered Memories.

In addition to this fun stuff, I released a new paper pack called Sheryl.



Also, a new page set called Friendship.



This cool layout that I did with the Friendship page set:



Lastly, I'm thrilled to announce that the Quick Pages that Ramona Vaughn created from the paper pack "Sheryl" are now available at Rendered Memories and, at Ramona's assistance, the are priced tremendously low!