Monday, September 8, 2014

Supreme Team 18 - Round One


GoDigitalScrapbooking.com is holding a "scrap-off' (my term for it) to find members for their Supreme Team 18.  The Supreme Team is that group of digital scrapbookers who act as their "design team."  A design team is a group whose members create pages, the sample pages, that get posted with new kits as they become available in the shop.
     During a Supreme Team contest, contestants (anyone who signs up to try) post a digitally scrapped layout to that week's gallery.  Contestants are provided with a kit to use.  The kit for Round One is one from Maria Designs called "Sew Beary Scrappy."
     It is a wonderful kit!  For the variety of pages I've made already from the kit, I have not recolored anything except a title using the alpha that is part of the kit -- and that was mostly to make it stand out from the background more than it did in the original color.  Actually, I did not "recolor" the alpha.  I used a feature of my scrapbooking program* and "filled" the selected item (the letters of the alpha) with a paper in the kit.
     Each week a few contestants are dropped and the rest go on to the next round until in the final week, the next Supreme Team is announced.  Members of the Supreme Team then spend the next four months as the Design Team for GoDigitalScrapbooking.com.
     GoDigitalScrapbooking.com is a great digiscrapping site.  The forums, the challenges, the galleries and the shop are all wonderful and delightful.  GDS, through the forums, has a Daily Download that is free.  And there is a program that gives discount codes to get a "Daily Download Rewind" item based on the number of comments you leave for your fellow scrappers.

Pop on over and check out the other entries in the Round One Gallery (ending time 9 AM ET, Monday, September 8, 2014).  Round Two is to be announced on Tuesday, 9/9.

Here are a couple other layouts I made using the "Sew Beary Scrappy" kit from Maria Designs at GoDigitalScrapbooking.com:




*  A note about the scrapping software that I use --
It is StoryBook Creator 3 from Creative Memories.  However, in 2013, when Creative Memories went into its second bankruptcy and the company was redesigned to go ahead into the future, they dropped the digital side of the business.  StoryBook Creator software was first produced by a company called Caspedia, but as the programmers came to producing version 4, they became Panstoria.  Panstoria released version 4, 8 or 9 months before Creative Memories introduced version 4 of StoryBook Creator.  In my mind, this was very bad business practice -- ethically -- though probably good in terms of profitability.  Nor was it very ethical that their price for the full version was about half or less than CM's and only slightly higher than an upgrade version from CM.
At that time, I downloaded the trial version of Panstoria's "Artisan" scrapping software.  I decided I really did not like or need the "improvements."  These are basically color coordination features.  I uninstalled it before the trial time was up.  I was and am more than satisfied with version 3. 
When Creative Memories finally released StoryBook Creator 4, since I was a CM Consultant at the time, I did get a copy of the upgrade to 4.  I eventually installed it figuring I would just ignore the features I did not want to use.  Then I could, at least, help customers if they used version 4.  However, while using it one day, while it sat there thinking about what it was doing, I accidentally hit the mouse button and the Windows message came up asking if I wanted to end the process.  Apparently, I chose the wrong option there and the program eventually shut down.  BUT it did not shut down.  Every time I tried to open up SBC4, I got an error message that said it was already running on my system.  Using "End Process" on the Task Manager did not end the process nor did shutting down the computer and restarting.  It stayed running, somehow, in Task Manager.  In the end I had to, not uninstall it (it would not uninstall since the computer thought it was running), but delete it.
I never got around to reinstalling it.   
While Panstoria did handle key codes for CM software and art packages for a while, it is too late to reinstall now (as far as I know).
The only truly downside to this -- I had given my husband a copy of his own of the software and a couple of page and art packages as a birthday gift a few years before that.  He created wonderful pages and books of his own fabulous photography.  Due to the need to take his hard drive back to original condition, the software needed to be reinstalled -- and that did not get accomplished in time.  If he wants to go back to creating his own pages again (he says he does not but I'm fairly certain he would love to, he just does not want to admit it) -- we would have to get the Panstoria version.  **sigh**
Creative Memories is now totally gone -- their reorganization did not work out in the end -- and there is no hope of them ever slowly going back into the digi-scrap side of scrapbooking.  In the near future I will put up a post about some wonderful options still out there to take the place of Creative Memories and their strap-albums for the traditional scrapper.  It is something I have an opinion about ...

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