A quick backtrack...

I took some time last night and this morning to review what I've blogged about, and what you all have commented about, to see what I might have missed and make sure I don't double post! LOL!

Well, I ran across this comment and wanted to draw attention to it for a minute. Sílvia said...

"Hi!

Well, I know about that "New window" view, though I think I've never used it. Might turn to be very helpful, will have to give it a try!

However, if you ALWAYS want the "other window" to show the full size image, the easiest thing to do is add the "Navigator" tab to the "right-panel" (the one that contains the Layers, History, Brushes.... tabs. I have customized it in a way which quite resembles Photoshop, and it works great for me!"

Well, I have not decided if I want to even USE the other window all the time, but I have learned a little bit more about the dialogue windows. Thanks Sílvia!

I think I'm gonna scrap zucchini

Okay, a BIG GRIN here. I LOVE the versatility of zucchini! And I grew some in my garden this year. Okay, I HAD a garden this year, and zucchini was one of the first veggies on my list to plant. So, in my attempt to keep this scrap-related, I'm going to scrap a page about my obsession with zucchini and all the ways I love to cook it! Here are some of my favorites:

zucchini bread
zucchini pancakes
BBQ zucchini slices
Mousakka with zucchini (instead of eggplant)
shredded z in salads
shredded or cubed z in caseroles of all kinds
shredded z in spaghetti sauce
cubed z in fried rice (I tried that last night!)

Wow. I think I might try z pickles this year, too. Zucchini makes me so happy! :D

So, what's your favorite food of the summer? Or for you Southern folks, what warms your tummy this time of year?

I'm still here...

Sorry it's been so long since I've posted. I'm still here. Not scrapping very much, mostly quick pages. Life has been kinda busy lately, and complicated. You don't wanna know, so I won't bother you with the details, but I AM alive and well, and will post some more useful information eventually. Thanks for visiting my blog, and I hope you find something useful while you're here. :) Happy Scrapping! ~Jen

Retraction...

Okay, that last post was NOT very well written, and I didn't try those instructions before I published them. Can you all just pretend I didn't write them??? And..... duh..... there was a layer in the file titled "delete this layer" which just happens to be all those titles. And if you really DO have titles imbedded in your template or template layer, use the color picker, not the "select by color" option and things will go much better. :D

Happy Scrapping! ~Jen

How obnoxious!

I finally discovered what an earlier reader was complaining about when she said she couldn't remove the words from the templates she used. Oy! now I see what she was talking about!

Well, here's how I am going to fix the problem. Start over.... whaaaaa!!!!!! And then I'm going to use the "select by color" tool, select the color of the layer I want to erase a word out of, change my eraser tool to that color, and erase the word! Yuk. Why do they have to create templates that way?!?!

Happy scrapping!

Using Your Mouse in GIMP

I got a new computer for myself after Christmas and now get to use a roller "middle button" on my mouse. It's an interesting little feature that I have been learning more and more about. Well, I've also learned more about using it in GIMP and I thought I'd share my discoveries. There are three ways that I've discovered to use my roller (with numerous others, I'm sure, that I either haven't discovered, or don't feel worth mentioning here):

1. Scroll up and down in my layout. I do this by rolling the roller button while inside my layout window. Useful when my image is scaled bigger than my window.
2. Scroll side to side in my layout. I do this by rolling the roller button while at the bottom of the image window, where the slider is to go left and right. Also useful when my image is scaled bigger than the window it is occupying.
3. Scale bigger and smaller scale in my layout. (This, my friends, is why you get this post today.) :) To do this, hold your pointer over the scale number at the bottom of your window. It might say 18% or 25% or something like that. Well, if you hold your pointer over that number, then use your roller button, it will scale your image larger or smaller, depending on whether you roll forward or backward! I KNEW you'd like that as much as *I* do! :D

Happy scrappin'! ~Jen

Summer Vacation!!

My 3 year old son's last day of preschool was last Thursday and summer vacation is HERE! I'm still trying to put together a little scrapbook for my 12 y/o niece for her graduation from elementary school LAST YEAR and have actually seen some success. I also ended up getting a Costco membership and am going to try getting some pages printed there. Seems like I hardly have printed any of my scrapbook pages--me who loves to sit down with a good book and just hold it in my hands and read it! The computer just isn't the same! I really have to print some pages and get them in my book asap! Okay, enough exclamation points. I'm rambling a bit. Gearing up for a vacation to see family, too, and have to make sure the camera is ready for the trip. I can't wait to take all those pics and scrap them! :D There will be 7 kids together all under the age of 7. It really sounds exhausting, but fun, too.

Do you have any older projects still on the burner? What are your photo ops going to be this summer? What will you scrap to remember this summer by? Toodles! ~Jen

What version do you use?

It has come to my attention that I am not using the most current version of GIMP thanks to Silvia, one of my readers. Although 2.2.13 is fairly recent(this is the version I use), there is now 2.2.14 which corrects several bugs in the program. And, although I read through the list of "bugs," I didn't see anything that was affecting my scrapping so I decided to stay with 2.2.13 for now.

GIMP, however, has CONSTANT development going on and occasionally a "development" version is released for download. Right now is a current example of this. 2.3.15 and 2.3.16 are both development releases and apparently present a fairly different kind of GIMP to its users.

But for those of you who are new to GIMP, or if you are considering upgrading to the development version 2.3.16, heed this warning from gimp.org:

"GIMP 2.3 Release Notes

This is an unstable development version of the GNU Image Manipulation Program. Please realize that this is just a snapshot of the development tree. We are about halfway up the hill to GIMP 2.4, the next stable release. GIMP 2.3 is in no way a final product. A lot of new features are incomplete and some things may even be completely broken. If you need to get work done, please use the stable version, GIMP 2.2."

You can find more at http://gimp.org/release-notes/gimp-2.3.html but with that kind of warning, I don't want to upgrade yet. I haven't learned to hit the save button often enough in my digi-scrapping yet!

So, now that you know what version I use, what version do you use?

Reading not writing?

Sorry I've been a little quiet. I'm on chapter 3 of Grokking the GIMP. It is pretty heavy stuff, and after over a year of using GIMP, in it's various versions, I finally have enough GIMP experience to read it without getting completely overwhelmed. Sorry you had to read that--yes, I get overwhelmed! :D LOL! And I've been so busy hangin' out here on the blog, and reading "Grokking..." (on the web) that I haven't had much time to do any scrapping. I guess it's about time I do some, isn't it. If you want to see my meager attempts at scrapping--you all are so far beyond me!--check out my gallery here. At least this is my biggest public gallery where I have given all the credits I'm supposed to. And some of them are older pages I did, before I knew how to do drop-shadows and stuff like that. Can you tell I've learned a lot since then?

TTFN! ~Jen

A new discovery!

Okay, I'm still working on trying to find out how to un-skew a picture, which someone asked about in the comments. BUT I have been reading "Grokking the GIMP" and found something VERY COOL that you scrappers are going to LOVE!

I don't know about you, but I just love to fine tune things when I am erasing some b/w to make a photo colorized, or erasing some of a paperclip to make it look realistic. I always want to see what it will look like when I view the whole image, so I go back and forth a lot, zooming in and out until I'm happy. Well, I found a way to not have to do that anymore!

While you have your layout open, do this: In the "View" drop down menu, click on "New View." This will open up a new window with a duplicate view of your current image (layout). Now you can zoom in on one, and not the other and do all the editing you please, close up, while watching the full sized view in the other window! Isn't that cool? I am way excited! Have fun playin' around with the new toy! :D ~Jen