VINTAGE

This is for Three Muses Vintage Challenge this week

SEWING

This is for  Take A Word Sewing Challenge this week.

 

STEAMPUNK

This is for Take A Word Challenge this week

Plenty More In The Sea

This is for the Three Muses Challenge this week.

WEDDING VOWS

I know that many couples, including my husband and myself, write their own wedding vows which is a personal preference between the couple. The old standard vows of in sickness and in health, for better or worse, forsaking all others, til death do us part, is a pretty good promise for what we all hope is going to be a life together.

 

These days couples fall in love and move in together and  plan for that beautiful wedding to take place with vows somewhere down the road.
 Is this the wrong thing to do since God wants us to marry first?

It takes a few years of living with someone to really learn all about them. Their habits, there moods, there ability to handle things for better or worse, in sickness and in health and some can't handle it and they run away. It is easier to break up and run away from issues in a relationship when you aren't married.

In my opinion, couples that have issues, should communicate and work through all the issues that pop up in a relationship, and we all know there are going to be some. When vows are broken is when the relationship starts to suffer, so when you take those Wedding Vows, listen to what you are saying. Weather they are your own or the traditional vows they have a purpose weather married or not.

What is your opinion?

KITS ARE NOT MY STYLE

Even though I had some digital kits created by my design team when I had the Digital Whisper Ning Network, I have not used kits until this past year. I am used to creating with images of people and things and using backgrounds of scenery or background papers using self taught techniques and taking Photoshop Grunge classes. Recently I have seen some really nice kits and just had to try to use some of the elements.
This piece was created with an Image of the lady and the background from Teddi Rutschman's" From Teddi With Love" and "Mythology" Kits. I also used some elements from Itkupilli. At first it is sort of difficult because I am not used to using kits but the more I add to the piece the better it looks.

I am happy with this one.

BE MY VALETINE

I am posting this for the Take A Word, BE MY VALENTINE Challenge

 

This was created by me in my early days of Photoshop

in 2008

BALLOONS

This is for Three Muses Challenge "Balloons"

BEHIND THE GREEN DOOR

Credits:
Working with new background from Itkupilli
Photo of doors from Ryan McGuire
Vintage lady from my collection
Photoshop Brushes

S&H GREEN STAMPS

Did you ever wonder what happened to S&H Green Stamps ?

I saved these stamps when I was a young Mother and always found it excited to have a couple of books full so I could go to the S&H Green stamp store to redeem them.

This was a great idea for consumers as well as for the stores and gas stations that give them out. 

Will they be coming back?

Read below to find the answer.

Sperry & Hutchinson began offering stamps to U.S. retailers in 1896. The retail organizations that distributed the stamps (primarily supermarkets, gasoline filling stations, and shops) bought the stamps from S&H and gave them as bonuses to shoppers based on the dollar amount of a purchase. The stamps—issued in denominations of one, ten, and fifty points—were perforated with a gummed reverse, and as shoppers accumulated the stamps they moistened the reverse and mounted them in collectors books, which were provided free by S&H. The books contained 24 pages and to fill a page required 50 points, so each book contained 1200 points. Shoppers could then exchange filled books for premiums, including housewares and other items, from the local Green Stamps store or catalog. Each premium was assigned a value expressed by the number of filled stamp books required to obtain that item.

Green Stamps were one of the first retail loyalty programs, retailers purchased the stamps from the operating company and then gave them away at a rate determined by the merchant. Some shoppers would choose one merchant over another because they gave out more stamps per dollar spent.
The company also traded overseas. During the early 1960s, it initiated S&H Pink Stamps in the United Kingdom, having been beaten to their green shield trademark during 1958 by Richard Tompkins's Green Shield Trading Stamp Company.
 
The program had its greatest popularity during the mid-1960s, but a series of recessions during the 1970s decreased sales of green stamps and the stamp programs of their competitors. The value of the rewards declined substantially during the same period, requiring either far more stamps to get a worthwhile item or spending money for an item that was barely discounted from the price at regular stores, creating a general downward spiral as fewer and fewer people saw them as worth the trouble.
In 1972, the company was brought before the Supreme Court for violating the unfairness doctrine. In Federal Trade Commission v. Sperry & Hutchinson Trading Stamp Co., the court held that restricting the trade of the stamps was illegal.

Sperry and Hutchinson was sold by the founders' successors in 1981. In 1999, it was purchased from a holding firm by a member of the founding Sperry family. At that time, only about 100 U.S. stores were offering Green Stamps. Eventually, with the rise of the Internet and the World Wide Web, the company modified its practices, and offered "greenpoints" as rewards for online purchases. The Greenpoints could be earned and redeemed at only a few stores, like Freshtown in NY State.

In 2013, the S&H Green Stamps brand was purchased by entrepreneur Anthony Zolezzi. His vision for S&H includes a reboot that will continue the nostalgic feel of the original game while bringing S&H into the 21st century. Zolezzi plans a refresh that includes using sustainability and health as the representative icons "S&H". “The focus will still be on collecting stamps and redeeming rewards’” says Zolezzi, “but in a modern way.” Zolezzi hopes to have the new program in place by Earth Day 2015^.

FRAME

This is for the Three Muses Challenge this week. 

 

This was created with images from Riandesigns.eu

HEARTS

This is a collage I did for the Take A Word Challenge.

 Credits:
Vintage Image (this same image was used in my very first collage)
Hearts are from Free Stock Hearts
Filters from Photoshop were used

  

My very first digital creation. I had just learned how to layer and use opacity. 

I was so excited to learn this.