HINTS AND TIPS

Copic Markers - What can these be used for? - You would be surprised !!!!!

1. They can be used on bling stones to re-colour them to. cordinate with your project

2. They can also be used to colour ribbons to cordinate with your card

3. They can be used to colour your Prima flowers

4. Use them to colour hard acrylic to make a stained glass affect

5. They can be used to colour you metal charms and embellishments

6. If get copic ink on your hands while colouring you can use the colourless blender pen to remove it

Fraying Ribbons

A great tip from Mindy - When crafting with ribbon you always have to be careful of your ends fraying, but that can easily be remedied by taking a cigarette lighter and just slightly edging it through the flame it will seal the ends and prevents fray. Test this technique out on your scrap ribbon first.

Digital Printing - Planning your design

To save money when you are printing digital design papers - it is a good idea to pull all your papers together in your software editing programme and then make up a page of the various papers you like. This was you can easily see if they actually sit well together and also it enables you to then cut out the squares of individual papers and then place them side by side and overlap them to see how they would look in your design. This way you only print what you need and there is no waste.

When you add this to the tip I gave last week about sizing your paper for your card before you sent it to the printer, you really are being extremely frugal with your paper and printer inks, so it really does work out cost effective.

To give an example of the theory above, here is a copy of the sample page I put together for my DT card this week. You can see from this how I narrowed down what I would use and not.

Hope this helps. Ann x

UPDATE/FIX on Blogger Viewing Issues

Blogger have identified that the issues with the Operation Abort error message in Internet Explorer is due to the Followers link being on the sidebar. They are trying to find a resolve for this but in the meantime they are saying that first move the Followers further down your sidebar, do not keep it near the top, this may resolve the issue. If this does not work then remove it for the time being until they have a fix. The problem occurs not only on your own blog but when you log onto any other blog that has the Followers link near the top of the page, that is probably why we keep getting the error message. Remember that if you are visiting a blog that gets the error message, click ok to the error message, and on the white page click the back button on your browser, this seems to allow the page to load and you can move around as normal.

Creating a hyperlink on your Challenge entries.

Below is a tutorial on how to create a Link to make it easy for everyone to quickly click to visit your blog page.

When you post your challenge entries in the comments section would you please add a direct link to your blog page to make it easier for people to just click on the link to visit you without the need to copy and paste into the address bar. This is quite a simple process (when you have got used to it) so here are some guidelines on how to do it.

1. First open up your blog page with the Challenge entry on the page and then at the top of the title bar you should see your own blog page starting with http:// etc etc.

2 .Highlight your address bar by right clicking and select copy from the drop down menu.

3. Until you are used to creating the link, it is best that you open up a word document and then carefully type in the exact line as below. Then remove the letters URL and in their place insert your blog address bar by pasting this into the line in between the inverted commas - make sure that you do not delete these - they are needed to make the link work. You may find it simpler then each week just to go back to where you saved this link and just copy and change the URL section to link in with the relevant page of your blog and then you are ready to copy and paste your link again on the comments page.

4. It is always worth previewing your entry on the comments page before you publish it just to make sure that it appears as a hyperlink so you know it will run properly - it should just show the words Here's my entry with no other detail.