Hi everyone!!

We’re so sorry we’ve had computer, server, internet and just about everything IT related problems….. We have only just been able to access the internet today – so please bear with us while we fix the problems.

For those that attended our Q3 Blog Party, we’d like to apologise for any problems you may have experienced with our live chat – we know some people were timed out and couldn’t access it at all so we’re very sorry for any disappointment.

We found out the problem and was due to an overloaded webhost server, we think it was because there were too many of us enjoying ourselves at the blog party! So they shut down the live chat – that was causing the problem!

We were SO looking forward to chatting with you guys as well as both our CTs, but it just wasn’t to be. We’ve been offline since Tuesday night with server problems so if anyone is waiting for a reply to any comments and giveaway winners, please bear with us…we’ll get there as soon as we can!

Hope you all had fun at the blog party – we definitely had a great time introducing our Q3 ranges to you, and we really appreciated your feedback. It looks like the storage drawers are destined to be a winner!

And for our TWO storage drawer WINNERs from Tuesday night……

Teresa and Amanda!

We loved both you innovative and creative ideas!!

Congratulations ladies!! Please email your contact details to competitions@kaisercraft.com.au so we can send out your drawers!!

Last, but certainly not least to help improve our Q3 Blog party for our next quarter’s releases -please post any feedback you have from the evening (good, bad and everything in-between) in the comment section below.  We’d love to know how many of you came along and also hear your thoughts on how it went, what you like, what you didn’t like, and even what you’d like to see next time!!

Thanks heaps! Alison & Rainie.

We promised it would be on the blog yesterday but due to server issues, we had to go back on our word (sorry, digi fans!)…but here it is, our latest Camp Stoneybrook digital layouts post, pretty as a picture and including tips from the CT team!

Feast your eyes on Donna’s intricate and so cute Stoneybrook layout, which we think features the most gorgeous little smile this side of anywhere.

Donna says she used a transparency over her background paper and set the blending mode of the transparency to “Color burn”, as well as increasing the opacity to 25 per cent.

The black border is also a transparency, from which she erased the bottom and duplicated it, then changed the border layer’s orientation to vertical by selecting Edit>Transform>Flip vertical. This changes the black border, not the entire layout.

For the title, Donna says she erased the ‘s’ from the “Happy Campers” word art and repositioned the exclamation mark closer to the final word.

Just personally, we’re really feeling the flourishes (we can’t remember when we last noticed flourishes used in a layout like this) and the wonky stitching border – not to mention all that rustic-y layering. Donna, we think your gorgeous photos must give you an inspiration overload because everything we see from you is just gold!

Now onto a different kettle of fish by Kathleen, who included a strip of felt down the side of the matting and a series of three very different photos that immediately piqued our interest.

Outdoorsy, au natural and reminiscent of lazy afternoons spent picnicking by the river, this is one layout that takes you back to that special day last spring. Roll on adventures, we say, and show us more of what we love using our mellow Camp Stoneybrook mega kit!

And if you doubted it could be used for scrapping any other kind of photos, guess again…Brittney shows us how the collection can be used for something a little more unusual.

Brittney says she hasn’t been camping in many years so she chose to scrap about autumn (or as US scrappers would say, fall) and football – to quote our resourcesful CT member, “Just because you don’t have pictures to match the exact theme doesn’t mean you can’t use the kit”.

She says she tried to keep her layout fairly simple, first using the quick selection tool in Photoshop CS3 to extract the player and ball from her photo, then copying them and colouring the new image black and white.

Brittney blended it by changing its overlay and capacity as well as adding a large but lighter shadow to make the football player stand out from the page.

For the title she added a white stroke around the letters with a soft drop shadow and then mimicked the main photo with a similar stroke.

Just goes to show, with a little creativity, some know-how and the confidence to think outside the square, any digi scrapper can pull off some slightly left-of-centre ideas for just about any layout using whichever collection takes your fancy!

Check out Camp Stoneybrook here and tell us what you think – which elements and brushes do you like and what else do you think we could have included in the mega kit?