As many of you already know, I am now a designer for Owl Tree Studio, creating digital scrapbooking kits and other digital goodies for members in our digiclub. I’m so excited to be a part of this team and we are officially opening doors on August 1st! Members will get at least five-full sized digital kits each month plus various other designer goodies, surprises from our creative team and lots of education on topics such as photoshop/photoshop elements, craft tutorials and photography tips. Page templates and quick pages will also be available monthly…loads of stuff!

In celebration of our upcoming launch, my fellow designers and I are doing a blog hop and we are each giving away some free one-month memberships! My giveaway starts now and ends Friday midnight PST, so that winners will be drawn on Saturday morning and announced this Sunday. Although you can only win once, you can try all methods below to increase your chances!

1. One winner from comments on this post – one comment per person please

2. One winner from tweets about this giveaway with link to this post including my twitter name @tortagialla so I can count you in the drawing

3. One winner out of those who like my tortagialla Facebook page

4. One winner from new subscribers to my tortagialla mailing list

Now on to the blog hop, please visit Jenn’s blog, the fabulous designer behind girl boy girl designs.

Also, don’t forget to sign-up for the Owl Tree Studio mailing list as well to get your free Beach Breeze kit and follow the Owl Tree Studio blog to keep updated!

Posted on July 26, 2010 at 11:27 pm | scrapbooking | 18 comments

Here’s a digital scrapbooking page I created using the Beach Breeze collaboration kit. You can get it for free by subscribing to the mailing list, pretty cool! It’s fun to do collab kits with the others designers on the team…how everything can be mixed up and matched to create a layout. I did a page about the Italian beaches…so filled because of the heat wave

Go ahead and get the free kit to test it out! Also, I’m exciting for the grand opening of the digital kit club that will showcase our full kits, bonus items and printables…lots of goodies and surprises. Find out more info at at Owl Tree Studio!

Posted on July 23, 2010 at 11:54 am | scrapbooking | 2 comments

Hi everyone! I’m getting more organized these days and trying to get weekly features up on this blog, including digital card designs as well as freebie digital stamps. Here’s a free set of floral patterns, along with a gerber daisy. You can use the florals in a background pattern design or just individually for a beautiful card. I’ve also realized that digital stamp designs can also be used for embroidery. The possibilities I suppose are only limited by your imagination! I came up with these while working on repeating pattern designs – often doodling just happens – so I thought it would be nice to share.

Download Floral Patterns Digital Stamps ZIP (754 kb)

Please note that all my freebies are for personal use only, but feel free to link or blog about this to get the word out. Enjoy!

Posted on July 21, 2010 at 4:47 pm | Free-Template-Tutorial-Links | 33 comments

Sometimes I design something, but then get distracted and totally forget about it. For this particular design I had run out of printer ink and couldn’t complete the card. Even when I bought more ink, I had already moved on to the next project and forgot that I had designed this hybrid card design. I thought I would post it anyone and see what you all think about this idea. It all started when I was inspired by a Jessica Sprague class on digital cardmaking. I was opened up to the possibilities of creating hybrid handmade cards, but not just printing out an image to color with copics. It’s such a creative eye-opener, so I decided to design one myself from scratch.

Download Just Saying Hellow Hybrid Card Design PDF (2.8 mb)

I created a simple card sketch and using the advantages of digital design to create my patterned paper. However, the card requires assembly with some sewing and added ribbon for that handmade touch and tactile feel. Of course, you could probably use the materials for a different card…I just happened to design it for that sketch. Let me know what you think, if you find these little projects fun and useful. Yay for hybrid card designs!

Posted on July 20, 2010 at 7:34 pm | Free-Template-Tutorial-Links | 7 comments

Yay! Exciting news, if you haven’t already figured out, but I’m a designer for the brand new digital scrapbooking club – Owl Tree Studio! I’m so excited for the launch in August and we are planning so many lovely things. Here’s a sneak peek of our upcoming kits…ooo!!!

Posted on July 19, 2010 at 9:10 am | Showcase, scrapbooking | 2 comments

I saw a video on the Hero Arts blog where Lisa Spangler created a little book of fortunes. I loved the idea and created my own, but for quotable quotes. I used some Japanese washi papers I had lying around and stamped inside with the Hero Arts Artistic Grapes stamp set. The green coloring on the inside pages is peeled paint Distress Ink – my favorite color!

I also used old dictionary pages, with words relating to each quote. I like the contrast of the formal Japanese design on the outside, that goes all grungy on the inside pages. It was really fun to create this book and super simple in terms of bookbinding techniques. I personally scored all my pages to create a gutter area for the binding. This way they are easy to flip already. This kind of binding takes up a chunk of the page on the left side, but it does make it all nice and neat. I’m realizing how easy this kind of binding is and how much more secure it is than rings, for example, for minibooks!

Posted on July 15, 2010 at 2:57 pm | Showcase | 5 comments

Woohoo! My little paper roll mini won second place on Scrapbook Crazy…how cool is that? Check out all the entries and hope you are inspired to create one yourself!

Posted on July 13, 2010 at 11:33 am | Showcase | No comments

Posted on July 7, 2010 at 7:58 am | scrapbooking | No comments

Oh my dear…I just logged into my Big Picture Scrapbooking account to start a workshop and noticed their announcement of the Big Idea Festival! It’s a free class with 13 days of 39 different projects, layout ideas and fun stuff! Talk about a steal…go sign up now! It’s completely free…that’s the amazing thing! The folks over at Big Picture are just so generous. I love ‘em!

Posted on July 1, 2010 at 9:26 am | Free-Template-Tutorial-Links | 2 comments

Posted on June 30, 2010 at 5:56 pm | scrapbooking | No comments