Creative Bloggers' Party & Hop 07.24.11

Welcome to another parade of boundless creativity! Thanks for coming and making Creative Bloggers' Party & Hop a part of your awesome day. Before I forget, I'm currently accepting applications for co-hosting position starting this August ;) You are more than welcome to let me know through an email or by leaving a comment if you're interested.

Giveaway
Just taking a vacation from doing giveaways, my friends. I wanna spend more time with my girls basking in the summer sun and doing fun summer activities.

With that said, I'm happy to announce the winner of $25 Store Credit at Ginger Snap Crafts. It's comment #27 - Bree from Bwildered. Congrats, Bree!



Co-host
One big thing that I admire from Creative Carmella, my co-host this week, is her culinary skills. Her apple crisp is to die for and other recipes she posted in her blog. She is one of the creative bloggers that make me come back to her blog to read some more.

Source: creativecarmella.blogspot.com via Homemaker on Pinterest

Blog Tip
I don't know about you, my friends, but me, I've been wanting to create blog pictures that look vibrant and eye-catching ever since I started blogging. Though my blog pictures are not as bad as they were 9 months ago, I still think that there is still much room for improvement, actually make that MUCH, MUCH more room for improvement. I wanted to go beyond the basics of autofix and cropping that I do in picnik or photobucket so I was so thrilled when I found Kim Klassen's free class on Photoshop Elements. I enrolled a tad late so I'm currently in the cramming mode but I tell you, I love every bit of it, especially that I finally understood what adjustment layers, layers mask, and opacity meant. There's more to learn and who knew that having assignments could be that enjoyable? She also offers in-depth classes at reasonable prices and I'm looking into enrolling one as soon as I have the budget. Joining her Texture Tuesday link party is my ultimate goal when I feel like I ultimately passed her high standard of excellence. (A woman can dream, right?). Her free class is now closed but keep an eye as to when the next class will be. Meantime, check out her free video tutorials. Just a quick disclosure that Kim didn't compensate me for mentioning her photography business in this post. I'm just sharing with you a good resource so that we can learn together, and maybe share a note or two.

Favorite Blog
You clicked, inlinkz tallied. The readers' favorite blog post this past week out of 200 links, being the most viewed post, is this beautiful post about Vintage Soda Crates. Tracy's Trinkets and Treasures' post also gave tip on how she made the colors pop using Photoshop Elements from Everyday Elements called In A Hurry. Check it out so you'll understand why this is the favorite blog of the week.

Source: tracys-trinkets-treasures.blogspot.com via Homemaker on Pinterest

Our Party
To the main course of this post.
For those of you joining us for the first time, we only have 2 easy, simple rules:

1) Link up your creative post - can be a DIY project, decor, photography, crafts, recipes, poem, thrift finds, link party, or that informative syndicated post that can make us laugh, or cry - in short, whatever you're proud of! And if you like to link more creative posts, go for it! We'd love to see them :) (No links to businesses or giveaways. We have another party for these exclusively every Tuesday called Market Your Biz & Giveaways at 5 pm, PST.)

2) Follow as many blogs as you desire, preferably starting first with the one who linked before you and after you, before branching out, and let them know by leaving a comment. (Following me and the co-host will be very much appreciated, and we definitely follow back. Just let us know you're following.)

Displaying the party button on your blog, while optional, is very much appreciated :)

Link opens up every Sunday at 5:00 pm, PST and ends Friday at 11:59 pm.

Because I like something different, I'm using the reverse entry for inlinkz - so the most recent participant will show up as number 1, thus giving everybody a chance to have the #1 spot.


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Friends, go ahead and mingle with one another :) Happy partying!





Burning question: Besides autofix and cropping, what other photo-editing techniques do you use?

So far, I'm still stuck with these 2 techniques to edit my photos so I'm currently exploring my free 30-day trial of Photoshop Elements 9 to figure out better ways. What about you? Please do share.