can I show you the best customer shipping notice email ever?

Hi Allie!

Thanks for your order with On Gossamer Wings!

Your wings have been lovingly created from the finest of fairy finery with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 fairies inspected your wings and polished them to make sure they were in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your wings into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterward and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Hurst waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private On Gossamer Wings jet on this day, Wednesday, September 22, 2010.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at On Gossamer Wings. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to On Gossamer Wings!!

.·*´¨)
¸.·`¸.·*´¨)
(¸.·´ ¸.·`¸.·*```Best fairy regards!
(¸.·´
Angelia Doyle, Chief Fairy Officer

action tricks

I've just gotta tell someone



love it. you can switch back just as easily to edit your actions and rearrange them and load them and things.

and the next one
you know you can alter your keyboard shortcuts
or add shortcuts to things that don't have them?

I wanted a shortcut for flattening an image
with actions and all the layers that come with them
you might be flattening quite a bit

ctl-e merges just fine and dandy but sometimes you just want it plain flat

here's how to change it:

edit > keyboard shortcuts
shortcuts for: palette menus (this is a drop-down menu)
Layers (click the triangle so it points down and shows you the choices)
Flatten Image (keep looking down, then click it)
F12 (that's just what I chose to be the keyboard shortcut)
accept it
OK it
try it

baby pictures

I took some baby pictures for my cousin recently
I think they're my favorite baby pictures
of all the baby pictures

sorry all you other baby pictures

family photos

I've been working on lots from the summer.
time to share my favorites.
first up: the Heaven family

this one is my favorite simply because of littlest sister

this one because really? blue eyes that blue?

this one because guess who the daughter's favorite princess is. hint=rhymes with Shmariel. seriously Amy, have you worked at Disneyland?

this one because first refer to picture 1. that's the face brother gave me most of the day. I finally got him with a conversation about why he thought Canada (their home) was better then Wyoming. his answers: they have lots of cows. it's really cold....like 8 foot high snow drift cold....they have colorful money....the John Deere store. hmmm, I'm not quite sold but I'm glad you opened up! tee hee

lots more over here

chugga (more summer fun)

my giant letters

my husband actually gets credit for this. you see he took Lily one Saturday to go recycle some things. us poor small town people have to drive all of our own recycling to the place, boo. anyway, I guess since he does it for us it makes no difference to me, yay! so they came back from their short trip with some information they knew mom would like. a certain big ugly store in town had been going through a remodel and good job to them, they were recycling all of their metal signage! hint=it's not Target. he checked with the volunteers working, or maybe you say volunteers volunteering?, either way, they said it was okay to take some. so we got ourselves some M's and some L's and a star even. and these:






do you think Mr. and Mrs. Previous Owner would be into it :)

time to take action

go ahead, take them!

just click the button

(or try right-click then save as... if not)

this action set does basically 2 things:

nicely done darkened edges (I despise the word vignette)

super easy custom black & white switcheroo

specific action-running instructions:
(if you need help just loading or playing actions try google or give me a jingle)

all actions are meant to be run on a single-layer flattened image

the action set includes:

{spotlight} does some fancy stuff first but basically darkens the very outer edges of your picture. darkens is not the right word because unlike the vignette in camera raw which just adds gray over top of your picture, this action darkens the colors that are already there.

{spotlight closer} does the same thing but just comes in closer to do it. since we're all starting with different picture sizes (like my pixels start out at 2592 by 3872 pixels)...I just wanted a couple options

{spotlight you choose} this action has instructions that pop up while it's playing. basically you get to drag the box to wherever you want it and resize to your heart's content. plus it's like I'm stopping by to give you a little tip every time you play it.

after every spotlight action you can lower the opacity of the layer with the dark edges on it to make the effect less dramatic. I always do.

{BEST b&w} after you've run this action you'll be left with your original background image in color + a basic b&w layer over that + a much more fabulous b&w layer over that. your mission is to adjust the opacity of the top layer only until you're happy and then flatten it all. different hair colors and shirt colors and backgrounds and everything play a part in how a b&w image looks so this lets you have a little control over that in a super quick way

ttv at the lake of the bears

we had all kinds of fun this summer

this was one of them

I wouldn't take my regular camera to the sandy beach

so I brought along my old backup

(that happened to be hooked up to a ttv getup)

p.s. one of the friends that day asked why I looked like I was taking so many pictures of the sand