Alyx in the Hobbit Hole

Hi Everyone!

Well, what an exciting couple of days for me.  Yesterday, the blog card I made on Saturday was featured in the 'Talent of the Day' spot on the Joanna Sheen Challenge Blog, and this morning one of my cards was on TV!!!  That's right...it was on Create and Craft for the MCS Four Day Deal.  I was up early to catch the 8am show and kept getting sneaky peeks of it as it was hidden behind the four CDs which are the Four Day Deal.  Lots of Platinum Club members had sent in cards for these shows and I could see some of them on the shelves behind and some were in the piles of samples they flick through.  8 o'clock show finished and still hadn't seen my card, so locked my lad in the cupboard (not really!!!!) so that I could watch the 10 o'clock show.  And lo and behold, in the last quarter of an hour my card featured as the demo card, which Diane did very beautifully I may add.  It is so thrilling to have one of your cards on the TV, and when you think of it, there aren't many hobbies which would make it possible for normal, every day crafters to have that honour, is there?  Good luck to all the other Platinum Club members who have sent cards in this week.  Hope yours are well displayed, demoed as well.xx

Anyway, I'm really feeling the love for Smudge the dog at the moment, so here is another card featuring the little critter.  He so reminds me of the special dog I had which I lost so many years ago now.

Now, this card is very similar to others I have previously put on here, but there is a reason for me wanting to show you this card.  The MCS software is incredible and you can do so many things.  MCS are constantly developing it and adding new tools.  And there are always so many things still to discover about the present software.

The other night I was thinking wouldn't it be great if we could use the colour picker on the 'colour' sections of their CDs, and also shapes we cut out using the 'digi punch' tools?  That would be incredible.  Yes, you can use the Brushes section and change the colour of the background, print that out and then use it how you want, but what if you only want a little bit of the colour?  That's an awful lot of ink wasted, as well as the card or paper.

So, I had a fiddle around.  I knew that you could use the colour picker (in Brushes section) on the text, so I went into text and typed a letter (any letter!).  I then made it larger and picked a colour and changed it.  Then I went into the Digi Punch section and brought up a circle digi punch which I used to punch out a circle from the coloured letter.  Low and behold I was left with a perfect circle in the exact colour I wanted.  I then messed around using the above Smudge image and I picked out a circle picking a light blue from the pale part of the bedding.  Another circle I used the blue hearts in the bedding, and then I used the blue stripes on his dressing gown.  And then I formed the mats and layers I wanted to.  The result is above...totally 100% perfectly colour matched mats!  

There is a big snag, though.  It's very fiddly as you cannot copy and paste to make more of the same shape and colour.  You have to do it the long way right now.  With luck MCS will enable us to do this in the future, but until then, here's one way to ensure that you always have the exact colour card you want to make your cards perfectly matched.

NB.  Another member of the Platinum Club has had a try at this and says that she can take the coloured shape onto a new page and then copy and paste, but I've tried it and can't do it yet so will speak to her again later.  If you save it as a jpeg, though, and then bring it back into the software, you can copy and paste it as much as you like.  

I really do hope this comes in helpful to some of you.

xx