Hello everyone,

Kayla aka keepscrappin here to start off the QOS 2012 – weekly challenges.

This week’s Sponsor is the fabulous -  Kim of kimbroedelet graphics and designs

Everyone who completes this challenge by midnight MT on Saturday, March 10, 2012 will receive this awesome mini kit from Kim.

And to top it off one lucky challenge participant will receive a $10 off coupon code to KimB’s Store.

Today we’re going to blast to the past and visit a Saturday Special Challenge from Cara aka colson.  I loved this Photo Sketch Challenge when she presented it last April, so I wanted to share her tutorial with all you.
Saturday Special 4-16-11: Turn Your Photo Into a Sketch.

Your challenge is to turn a photo into a sketch and use that photo on your layout.  Feel free to add any other photos you’d like to your layout, but it must have at least one photo that has been turned into a sketch.  Post your layout in your SM member gallery, and then link us up to it in the QOS week 1 challenge thread in the SM forum, so we can send you the participation prize, see your handiwork and leave you some love.

And here’s my layout using the NEW kit – I want Candy Collab from our March Guest Designers – Find Your Bliss Designs and Pink Reptile Designs

And how about this And this cutie from CTM, Carol (Iowan).  She used Back 2 Skool from Haynay Designs.

And this beauty from CTM, Jan (QuiltyMom) for some more inspiration.  She used Swan Lake from Siamese Studio.

Also, Jan (QuiltyMom) figured out how to do this in SBC+ 4 so here’s the instructions for that.
After making your photo b/w, go into Format>Filters>Stylize>Show Edges. Don’t invert. (Well, you can invert if you want to, but it looks better if you don’t.)  And then you’ve got a photo sketch!

And I didn’t forget about the rest of you… if your program won’t turn a photo into a sketch you can visit www.befunky.com to turn your photo into a sketch there for free.  I’ve only briefly worked with the tools there, so I can’t help much, but here’s how I turned a photo into a sketch there.

Go to www.befunky.com > Click on apply photo effects > click upload a cropped photo from your computer > click charcoal > click on the charcoal thumbnail of your photo > adjust the sliders of for the look you want and click apply to save. It’ll save it in the folder where you uploaded your photo from.  Now use your photo sketch on a layout.

And now for the niddy griddy:

–All participants need to be signed up as a QOS contestant.
–NO double dipping, your page must be a unique LO created especially for this QOS challenge!  Layouts submitted for the QOS Weekly Challenges will not be used for BINGO Challenge credit, but do count for your QOS count.
–In order for the LO to count for QOS count, a link to it must ALSO be posted in your QOS weekly LO entries thread in the QOS forum.
–The winner of this challenge will receive a $10 coupon to KimB’s store.
–Layouts must be posted by 11:59pm on March 10th, MST in order to be eligible for the participation prize!
–Current ScrapMatters CT members, DT members, and admin may play along in the challenge but are not eligible to win prizes. (CT members for individual SM designers NOT on the SM CT are eligible).
–Have fun!

I hope you have been practicing your curtsy!  SM has just wrapped up our 3^rd annual Queen of Scrap Contest – it has been absolutely AMAZING to watch!

This year the contest was bigger than ever.  More contestants, more participation gifts, more pages and more prizes!  We had 157 scrappers enter our contest. Collectively they created 6765 pages and projects during the month of May! That is a LOT of scrapping!

There were brag books, hybrid projects, pages about kids and parents, pets and friends.  There were even pages about the contest itself!  There were many pages that made us laugh and just as many that made us cry.  Either way, they touched all of our hearts.

The QOS gallery was FULL of inspiration and artistic talent.  Everyone who entered should be so proud of themselves!  I am certain that most of them scrapped more LO’s this month than they ever dreamed possible.  We had 14 people scrap over 100 pages EACH during the contest!  56 people scrapped more than 50 pages each!  That is pretty amazing!

We had one incredible layout artist scrap 200 pages – on her own – in one month!!!  As our “Top Poster” (the person who created the MOST LO’s during the contest) , she will win a $50 gift card to the ScrapMatters shop!  She will also win prizes from our contest sponsors.  A one year Gold Membership from DigiShopTalk and a copy of List your Life – A Log Your Memory Journal List from Log Your Memory!

Congratulations citygurl08!  You are our Top Poster!

Now before I get to the second part of the contest and announcing the Queen of Scrap & the Princesses of Scrap – we let the QOS contestants have a little fun voting for their new friends.  Each of these winners will receive a $10 coupon to one of our designers shops!

Miss Congeniality – for the QOS participant who was the most friendly and social during QOS – (sponsored by Happy Scrap Girl)…. mommy22girls

Miss Photogenic – for the QOS participant with the best overall photography on her layouts (sponsored by Jenn Barrette)… sporte91

Miss Trendy –  for the QOS participant who uses a lot of the recent trends on her QOS layouts (sponsored by WM[squared])… Ddamsel

Miss Clusterqueen – for the QOS participant with the best overall “clustered” pages (sponsored by Denise Beatty Originals)… kathleena

Miss Wordy – for the QOS participant with the best overall journaling on her pages (sponsored by Geeky Diva)… merchi

Miss Rising Star – for a QOS participant who is “new” to ScrapMatters with the best overall pages (Sponsored by The Design Girl)… Inkspots

I know you have all been waiting for this part.  I’m sure that many of you scrolled right to the end of this post just to see who won!    We’ll here is the part you have been waiting for.  One of these lucky ladies is going to be crowned ScrapMatters Queen of Scrap! Two lucky ladies will also be named the “Princess of Scrap”. The princesses will receive a one month guest spot on our CT. The Queen is to win a three month guest spot on our CT. To qualify for this part of the competition, the participants had to be in the top 30% of  posters with the most layouts created for May.  To be in the top 30% and be considered for the QOS, each person had completed at least 60 LO’s!  Each of these princesses should take a bow – I’m sure many scrappers struggle to make that many pages in a year! You can truly tell that they are very passionate about this craft and the subjects of their layouts.

Well, it would have been way too hard for one person to pick a winner, so we put the fantastic ScrapMatters team members to work! We poured over their galleries and each of us voted on who we thought should be the winners. It was so hard to decide!

Are you ready?

ScrapMatters Princess of Scrap – TWO people will be chosen to win a ONE month guest spot on the ScrapMatters.com CT!  In addition to their guest spot they will also win these AWESOME prizes!

A one year subscription to Creating Keepsakes Magazine
One copy of List your Life – A Log Your Memory Journal List from Log Your Memory!
One month of the “Fix” from DigiScrapAddicts!

Please help me congratulate Brenda (Brenda Smith Designs) & Tanya (tanyarank)!  Ladies your galleries are amazing!

And now for ScrapMatters Queen of Scrap – true digiscrap royalty! One person will be chosen to win a THREE month guest spot on the ScrapMatters.com CT! In addition to the guest spot, the Queen will also win these AWESOME prizes!

A “Bamboo Craft” pen tablet from Wacom!!! It’s a $130.00 value!
A 1 year subscription to Creating Keepsakes Magazine!
One month of the “Fix” from DigiScrapAddicts!
A Real Life Weekly Challenges Book from Log Your Memory!
A one year Gold Membership from DigiShopTalk

Wow – that is an amazing prize pack!

OK now this is the part that you have been waiting for…..

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Cheryl (gonewiththewind)!!!!  Congratulations Cheryl!  the team at ScrapMatters.com is so very excited to have you join us!!! We would love to have you take on a guest CT spot on our team – allowing you access to our shop to scrap your heart out!

Here are just a few of her stunning pages.

I will be contacting all of the winners later today with their prize information!

Please be sure to stop by all the QOS galleries to see their amazing work this past month.

I also want to take a minute to thank the people that made this contest possible this year.  Thanks to all of our corporate sponsors for their generous donations!  Thanks to our AMAZING design team – they worked so hard to create the participation gifts for the contest and MANY of them went above and beyond to offer addition prizes for the challenges and extra prizes & to help with coordinating the contest.  Thanks to our CT for putting together the template pack participation prize, distributing the prizes and hosting the challenges.  Thanks to the newsletter team & the ad team for working so hard to coordinate all of the extra ads this month & putting together another amazing newsletter.  (GOSH, you’d think I’d won the award, lol)!  Thanks to the SMG for all of the sweet, heartfelt, amazing comments you left in the gallery!  I don’t know how you do it, but we appreciate you more than you know!  Thank you to the admin team who helped coordinate this contest, line up prizes, save my sanity and all of the other wonderful things that you do.  And last but not least… Thank you to everyone that participated either by scrapping or cheering for this contest.  It was so much fun this year!

I’m here today with a HUGE announcement! Many of you may know that Scrap Matters has been running a month long challenge to find the “Queen of Scrap” and the “Princess of Scrap”. This is our second year running the contest and we are amazed at how much it has grown!

This year we had an amazing 107 fantastic women enter the challenge and complete at least one layout. I am certain that they are all very anxious to read about the big winners. These women were amazing – they completely blew me and the rest of the ScrapMatters.com Team away! Not only are they fantastic scrappers, but they are quick! I am in awe at the number of layouts that they completed. Collectively, they scrapped 4,705 pages during the month of May. That is a LOT of pages!

They scrapped about their kids, and their families, their vacations and celebrations, their joys and their sorrows. They truly poured their hearts and souls into their creations, gave us windows into their lives and showed off their artistic talents.

Each and every one of these princesses should be very proud at what they accomplished. Most of them scrapped significantly more layouts than they normally do during a month. Now, their families may not have been too excited about this, as I heard lots of chatter about dirty house & extremely supportive spouses! We even had a few scrap related injuries this year! Don’t worry though – everyone is on the mend now that they can rest their “scrapping arms”

Our competition had two parts to it. First, we were looking to find the person who could scrap the most pages during the month of May. Each of the participants could receive prizes at 4 different levels. We had 95 people complete at least 5 pages to reach level 1. 80 of those reached level 2 and scrapped at least 20 layouts for the month. Level 3 was to scrap 35 pages, and 45 women reached this level! Level 4 was to complete 50 pages – we had 33 people reach this level. We couldn’t believe how many scrapped more than 100 pages for the month – 13 people! We even had 2 people scrap over 250 layouts for the month – isn’t that AMAZING!!!

The person that scrapped the most pages for the month is to be awarded a $50.00 gift card to the ScrapMatters.com shop. That amazing and very talented scrapper scrapped an astounding 260 pages during the month of May! WOW!!! That speedy scrapper is Becky (photomom1216)!!!! Congratulations Becky!

Now I mentioned that our challenge had a second part to it… one of these lucky ladies is going to be crowned ScrapMatters Queen of Scrap! Two lucky ladies will also be named the “Princess of Scrap”. The princesses will receive a one month guest spot on our CT. The Queen is to win a three month guest spot on our CT. To qualify for this part of the competition, the participants had to be in the top 10 posters with the most layouts created for May. These women worked hard to get into those top 10 spots. Each of them created over 100 layouts each! Each of these princesses should take a bow – I’m sure many scrappers struggle to make that many pages in a year! You can truly tell that they are very passionate about this craft and the subjects of their layouts.

Well, it would have been way too hard for one person to pick a winner, so we put the fantastic ScrapMatters Creative & Design team members to work! We poured over their galleries and each of us voted on who we thought should be the winners. It was such a difficult choice to make but…

We actually had a 3 way tie for the “Princess” spots and have decided to give each of them a one month guest CT spot!

These lucky ladies are:

Cristina (cristina)

Krisi (krisi616)

Jan (QuiltyMom)

They all worked SO hard – be sure to stop by their galleries to check out their hard work. You can click on their user names above.

Get your curtsy ready readers …..

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The Queen of Scrap is Erica (princess.erica)!!! Congratulations – the team at ScrapMatters.com is so very excited to have you join us!!! We would love to have you take on a guest CT spot on our team – allowing you access to our shop to scrap your heart out!

Not only is Erica a fast scrapper (she entered an amazing 140 pages!) but, she is very talented with her page designs and is an all around sweet gal with a great sense of humor!

Here are a few of our favorite pages that she has created. Click on the pics for credits:

Congratulations to Erica, the Princesses and everyone who participated!

ScrapMatters has so many terrific things planned for [inter]National Scrapbook Day (NSD) that I don’t know where to start. First off we are having a sale—40% off all personal use digital scrapbook products, except grab bags and clearance, on Friday, May 1st and Saturday, May 2nd. The sale continues at 30% off throughout Thursday, May 7th. Commercial use products will also be on sale for various discounts.

Did you notice the phrase, “except grab bags” in the above paragraph? Many of our designers have put together fabulous grab bags for you! We also have a new mega-collab kit called Hawaiian Happy Hour FREE with a $15 purchase in the shop. It is just fabulous—see for yourself:

Hawaiian Happy Hour Mega Kit

We are having a blog train featuring quick pages made by our CT/DT using Hawaiian Happy Hour as well. It will start on Saturday, May 2nd at 7am Pacific time on my blog: http://andilynn.wordpress.com. You might find some other little goodies as you hop on and off the blog train as well. ;D

We are having lots of speed scraps, challenges and games throughout the week as well. We had so much fun last year during NSD that I can hardly wait for the good times ahead starting this weekend.

We are announcing the winners of the Design Star Contest on Friday, May 1st. We are so excited with the talented new batch of apprentices that we have. It was such a great contest with so many good applications that it was really hard to choose who to take onto our team.

May 1st is also the start of the Queen of Scrap Competition (QOS).

Throughout the contest there will be chances for everyone to win free template sets, free kits and more. Natural Wonders, the mega kit pictured below, is one of the amazing participation prizes.

Denise Beatty, our reigning Queen, and Happy Scrap Girl are in charge of this year’s QOS competition and I know that they have lots more fun things planned. Look for additional details to be revealed soon!

The best part of NSD and QOS is getting to know and spend time with you! Hopefully you will take time to drop by, make some new friends and enjoy the fun.

Hi all, Andrea here. Thanks to our fabulous tech team at webSeitler our blog now looks like the rest of the site and is so much easier to navigate. So tell us what you think about our blogs new look. Do you like it? Did you even notice? I will draw one lucky winner from all of the comments on this post on Sunday night, April 19th and award one lucky winner a $5.00 gift code to the shop and two winner will each receive my latest kit for free. So three chances to win just for leaving a comment!

Also a heads up that we will be moving to a bigger, faster server starting around April 21st. We hope we won’t be down for long, but it could take a few days until we are all the way up and running. We will post the exact date and time on the blog as it gets closer. I am so stoked about getting a server that will speed things up during high volume times. This should also make downloads of products and freebies from the site less prone to errors.

Mark your calendars for our [inter]National Scrapbook Day extravaganza. We are starting our celebration on Friday, May 1st and the party will continue for a week. We’re having a free with purchase kit, a sale (gotta have a sale), a blog train, speed scraps, grab bags, challenges, games and more fun. Stayed tuned for more information.

The Queen of Scrap competition is coming soon too! We had a blast last year and are planning even more fun this year.

The SM newsletter was delivered yesterday to all of our subscribers. A special thanks to Jeni Hopewell and the newsletter team for working hard to get you another fabulous issue. If you didn’t receive yours in your email (check your spam) please sign up again here on this blog, your subscription will start with the next issue. You can also hop over to my blog and get links for the current issue.

The Design Star contest is coming to a close shortly, make sure that you go check out the freebies while they are still available. If you haven’t registered for the forum/gallery yet, now would be a fantastic time to do so, because that’s the only way you can see the freebies. Remember you have to be logged into the forum first, then click on the gallery tab. And once they’re gone you might not see them again! The 10 Design Star finalists have come up with some fabulous challenges with terrific participation prizes too.

Hopefully by now I’ve written enough for you to have something to comment on. I love hearing how you are inspired by each other and by our CT and DT. You are what makes the SM community so special! Thanks so much for being our inspiration.

Keep reading for Photography Phriday and What’s New at ScrapMatters!

I’m here today with a HUGE announcement! Many of you may know that Scrap Matters has been running a month long contest to find the “Queen of Scrap”.

We had 31 fantastic women enter the challenge and I am sure that they are all so very anxious to read about the big winners. These women were amazing – they completely blew me and the rest of the ScrapMatters.com Team away! Not only are they fantastic scrappers, but they are quick! I am in awe at the number of layouts that they completed. Collectively, they scrapped 1063 pages – and nope, that’s NOT a typo! That is a LOT of pages!

They scrapped about their kids, and their families, their vacations and celebrations, their joys and their sorrows and the most common theme appeared to be anything DISNEY! They truly poured their hearts and souls into their creations, gave us windows into their lives and showed off their artistic talents.

Each and every one of these princesses should be very proud at what they accomplished. So many of them scrapped significantly more layouts than they normally do during a month. Now, their families may not have been too excited about this, as I heard lots of chatter about dirty house & extremely supportive spouses!

Our competition had two parts to it. First, we were looking to find the person who could scrap the most pages during the month of May. In planning this challenge, we never expected to see numbers even close to these. We had 20 scrappers scrap over 20 pages each! 14 scrappers completed over 35 pages! 6 of these ladies scrapped over 50 pages this month! And we had 2 amazing women scrap over 100 layouts each!

The person that scrapped the most pages for the month is to be awarded a $20.00 gift card to the ScrapMatters.com shop. That amazing and very talented scrapper is Lina (ldrag2004)!!!! Congratulations Lina! Lina scrapped an astounding 122 pages during the month of May – WOW!!!

Now I mentioned that our challenge had a second part to it… one of these lucky ladies is going to be crowned ScrapMatters Queen of Scrap! The Queen is to win a guest spot on our CT. To qualify for this part of the competition, the participants had to be in the top 5 posters with the most layouts created for May. These women worked hard to get into those top 5 spots. Each of them created over 70 layouts each! Each of these princesses should take a bow – I’m sure many scrappers struggle to make that many pages in a year! You can truly tell that they are very passionate about this craft and the subjects of their layouts.

Well, it would have been way too hard for one person to pick a winner, so we put the fantastic ScrapMatters Creative & Design team members to work! We poured over their galleries and each of us voted on who we thought should be the Queen. It was such a difficult choice to make but…

Get your curtsey ready readers…..

The Scrap Matters Queen of Scrap is…. Denise (Neeceebee)!!! Congratulations – the team at ScrapMatters.com is so very excited to have you join us!!! We would love to have you take on a full time CT spot on our team – allowing you full access to our shop to scrap your heart out!

Not only is Denise a fast scrapper (she entered an amazing 113 pages!) but, she is extremely talented with her page designs and is an all around sweet gal!

Here are a few of our favorite pages that she has created. Click on the pics for credits:

You can check out more of her fantastic layouts here in her gallery.

I hope you will all join me in congratulating our new Queen!

Hey everyone, Andrea here. Today is the day we start our very first ever QUEEN of SCRAP contest and I am so excited about it! With participation prizes, a chance at becoming a guest CT member, a participation blinkie and a special blinkie proclaiming the winner as the Queen of Scrap, what have you got to lose? If you’re interested click on the ad and go visit the forum for the complete list of rules and prizes! Happy Scrap Girl has been working so hard to make this fabulous contest fun for everyone.  Hope to crown you soon!

Now continue reading for Tami’s excellent Words for Wednesday post.