I have hundreds of fonts on my harddrive and every time I visit a font site, I’m still downloading more. There’s no such thing as too many fonts!

Having said that, I noticed that I’m using some of those fonts more often than others. Especially when it comes to journaling or creating Digital Scrapbook titles, I keep going back to the same fonts. So I thought I’d share 10 of them with you today

1. Always Forever

2. Little Miss Priss

3. Parson-Condensed Bold

4. Sharonshand

5. Zonkershand

6. Kids First Print

7. Simply Glamorous

8. Dena’s Print

9. Painted

10. Worstveldsling

Have fun downloading, but make sure to read the TOU as most fonts are for personal use only! If you do want to use them commercially, make sure to buy a license.

See more of my favourites in this post

April 30th, 2013 HRH Queen Beatrix will abdicate in favour of her son who will be HRH King Willem-Alexander and his beautiful Argentinian wife (and my favourite Dutch Royal) HRH Queen Máxima.

Print them and use a 2.5 inch circle punch to cut them out. Simply stick them to a gift or punch a hole and add a string to attach it.

There are 11 tags with text (to/from) and 11 blank tags, all png files, so digital scrapbookers can use them in their Christmas layouts. Oh, and the background is included

Download Printable Christmas Tags 14 MB

Enjoy!

If you find something you like, please leave some love, we all worked hard to provide you with free (digital) scrapbooking supplies and it means the world to us to know people enjoy our labour

Download WWCSF Part 2 10 MB

This post is my first Christmas present to you. I have planned more, but I have no idea how much time I’ll have to finish and upload them. Regular visitors will know that I’m always full of plans, but I also am procrastinator #1 and strange enough those two don’t go well together.

It’s a miracle that I managed to create a kit for the WWCSF, as my muse was no where to be found. I made myself a cup of hot cocoa, put the Christmas Station on my headphones and once I decided on the colours there it was… my creativity was back! After working long hours, I can now proudly present my contribution to the Worldwide Christmas Scrapbooking Freebies Blog

I’ve divided the kit in two, and you can download part I today. Make sure to come back tomorrow for Part 2!

Download WWCSF Part 1 11 MB

We bought the DVD yesterday and – of course – had to see it immediately. I have to admit, I was a bit reluctant, as I saw some snippets and wasn’t too happy with some of the characters.

One of the joys of reading is that you see the characters in your mind – at least I do. They get a face, a heart, character traits, I hear their voice when I read what they say and because everyone has a different imagination it’s impossible to cast the movie actors exactly as you’ve envisioned the book characters.

I can live with the movie Katniss and Gale. I’ve accepted Katniss, she wasn’t MY Katniss, but she made the character come alive and was convincing. Peeta grew on me, definitely didn’t like him the first time I saw him, but he did the character justice.

Primrose was spot on, sweet, innocent, loveable. Same as Rue (cried my eyes out reading the book ánd watching the movie, though the scene in the book was more elaborate and therefore more impressive to me).

Woody/Haymitch was totally off, IMHO. He just didn’t convince me and was so different from the Haymitch in my mind. Much too young for instance and not as dispicable. Yes, he played drunk, but I hated the book Haymitch at first, Woody was just… Woody.

President Snow.. Nope. Donald Sutherland is a great actor, but he wasn’t Snow to me. I know Sutherland has it in him to play nice while being lethal, and I don’t know if his part in the movie was too small to make the lethal part clear, but he looked like a nice old man. Now, this could be because I’ve read all three books and can’t remember exactly when it became clear that Snow wasn’t a nice man (understatement). Maybe he appeared nice in book 1, if he did, my apologies to Donald Sutherland, lol.

The tributes from the other districts haven’t made much of an impression on me – in the books I mean. They could’ve been played by any actor and I would have accepted them as okay.

I thought that they solved the explaining part in the movie, by using the comments of Ceasar Flickerman, brilliantly played by Stanley Tucci.

When I first saw images of Cinna (and I’m ashamed to admit that I didn’t recognize Lenny Kravitz without his sunglasses) I thought no… but now I’ve seen him, I think he did great.

The ‘computer room’, heart of the Hunger Games: awesome! The almost caricature costumes/wigs: great! Scenery: A+. Missed details, but that’s understandable as they only have so much room in a movie to explain the story.

People asked me which I thought was better Harry Potter or The Hunger Games. First, it’s irrelevant, both series are so different and both are good. Knowing my love for HP, I don’t think there will ever be a book that tops it. What both series have in common is the imagination of the author. The way they come up with, invent, items and incorporate them in life ‘as we know it’.

Overall, a great movie, can’t wait for #2 and #3!

If you’ve seen the movie and/or read the books, please leave a comment. I’m curious about your thoughts on either of them.

How I managed to ignore the success of the Hunger Games series, I’m not sure, but I did. Until the movie came out and I saw book #1 on a prominent spot in the bookstore (and at a discount, so that’s always a good thing ). I could hit myself for not reading the book sooner, but better late than never!

I’ll just copy my reviews from goodreads.com – no big spoilers!

April 7th-June 14th 2012 The Hunger Games
When I started reading, I was grabbed by the story and felt a connection with the people. I stopped reading when I reached chapter 6, not sure if I wanted to read on about kids slaughtering each other.
After talking to people who already read the book, who urged me to go on, I finally decided today that it couldn’t be too bad when so many people kept recommending it.
So.. this morning I picked the book up again and finished it several hours later.
It is well written, kept me turning page after page because you just want to know what’s going to happen next.
The only thing I regret is not buying books #2 and #3 in advance, now I have to wait till they get here to read on.

I orderded the books online that same day and lucky for me they arrived 2 days later!
Book #2 was as good as book #1 (to me anyway). Wasn’t ready to write a review after reading it. The only thing I thought when I read “This is the end of Book 2″ was: WHAT THE HECK?? This is the worst -or best- cliffhanger ever!
The strange thing is that I hate violence, murder, torture, etc. I prefer reading books where the suspense keeps me on the edge of my chair, the unknown events that make my heart pound by just thinking about what COULD happen on the next pages, or the image in my head of what IS happening, but what’s not mentioned in words, no gory details, you know what I mean? Still, I couldn’t stop reading. Started Catching Fire at June 16th, finished it June 17th – thank goodness for my days off!

June 18th-June 23rd The Mockingjay.
Before I started reading, some people told me not to expect too much of it, as they didn’t like the book and the ‘climax’ was a disappointment. How wrong they were.
Even though I was reluctant to start reading – what’s the use of reading a bad book? – I ignored the negative comments and I’m glad I did.
I was immediately grabbed by the story again. Susan Collins’s style of writing does something to me, it works like a magnet, pulling my eyes from word to word, eager to skip a few lines to see if something bad is going to happen, but then going back to the beginning of the paragraph and read word for word.
I didn’t need yet another Hunger Games in book #3, so I was glad it started relatively peaceful in District 13. I prefer the suspense over the actual fights and killing, but knew that eventually the story had to end with violence again.
No big spoilers from me, so I just conclude with saying that I love the end, the solution to all problems, the peace and the revelation when Katniss realizes who she really needs in her life and why.
Thank you, Suzanne Collins, for the ‘food for my soul’. Your awesome writing style made me read a genre that I’d never thought I would read. Although I still think that the pods and the games are too cruel, I can see it being some sort of metaphor for the bad things happening in this world right now. The wars, suppression, famine, the gap between poor and rich, the exploiting of the earth’s sources …
We have to be careful or we will destroy ourselves and everything on this planet.

For years and years one of the programs on a Dutch Radio Station started the show by playing a piece of music accompanied by the sound of an old fashioned typewriter. I loved it and anyone of my generation (in Holland) probably knows the music as it was a very popular radio show.

Today, while browsing youtube videos, I suddenly noticed – in the list of videos which appear on the right of the youtube pages – a video called: ‘The Typewriter’ and I thought: ‘No…. that can’t be it, now can it?’ So I clicked and lo and behold, there it was. I was so happy (and used ‘replay’ a lot :p). That’s when I learned the composer was called Leroy Anderson (1908-1975. Official Website). Many performances of The Typewriter on youtube, but this is my favourite:

There are more videos featuring Anderson’s work. All masterpieces IMHO. The interesting part is that they are all light concert pieces and you’d think they’re easy to play, but there are many comments at the different videos where people stated that the music is intricate and quite difficult to perform – check youtube and you’ll find some terrible performances as well, just shows the level of skill needed to play Anderson’s work. According to Wikipedia John Williams described him as “one of the great American masters of light orchestral music.”

Anderson wrote many, many great pieces of music, but to name just a few (great titles!): The Waltzing Cat, Sandpaper Ballet, Clarinet Candy, A Trumpeter’s Lullaby, Bugler’s Holiday, The Syncopated Clock, Plink Plank Plunk, Fiddle Faddle, Jazz Pizzicato,  and last but by no means least … *drumroll* … Sleigh Ride!

Well waddayaknow, one of my favourite Christmas tunes! Listening to it year after year and I never knew Leroy Anderson wrote it!

As I said in the beginning, I will never forget his name now!
(Useless fact: it’s 7 months until Christmas )

Let me continue by saying that I love tumblr. You can find gems: images created by other people on tumblr, with quotes or beautiful photoshopped images from their favourite band, movie, TV show, you name it. I sometimes pin those images to one of my pinboards, with a link back to the particular tumblr account.
Many tumblr accounts (dare I say: the majority..?) take images from the www without a link back and this is driving me crazy. Pictures of nature, scenery, ballet, fashion, etc., downloaded from the original site, uploaded to tumblr (or iheartit or any other ‘collection’ site) without giving credit.
I’ve also noticed that people on Pinterest download an image and upload it to their pinboards. Nothing more frustrating than seeing an image of – for instance – a chocolate cake, without a link to the original recipe. I hate sitting there drooling over a cake I want badly and not being able to make it!!

Not too long ago I found a tip on The Graphics Fairy about dragging and dropping an image to google and do a search, but the ‘dragging and dropping’ didn’t work for me. Glad to say I found another way to do a search. It still takes a bit of work, but it’s possible to find the original source of an image.

* Go to Google

* Click ‘images’

You’ll see a little camera icon in the Google searchbar

* Click the camera icon
It will ask you for a url (or you can upload an image you found somewhere)

* Open a new window and go to the image you want to investigate
* Right click and pick ‘copy image url’ (or something similar. My Google is in Dutch, so I’m not exactly sure what the English translation is)
To make things visible, I used an image of mine I pinned to my Digital Scrapbooking board.

* Go to the other window and paste the url in the Google searchbar

* Click ‘Search’
You will now see the image and a list of links which use the image.
Sometimes it’s clear where the image is from, usually one of the first sites on the list. Not always though. In that case:
* click ‘all sizes’ and you’ll see all the sizes of the image used on the www

You can bet that the original source has the largest image – as it’s the original – et voila, you have the source, and you can pin THAT image, which will link back to the original owner.

Unfortunately it’s not always that easy, and I stumbled upon images which I couldn’t trace back to the original source. In that case – as much as it hurts, as the images sometimes are so beautiful – I don’t pin the image. I’d rather not use it than to pin it and not link back, or – even worse – link back to tumblr or a blog which obviously didn’t create the image but found it somewhere on line.

Call me picky, call me strict, call me whatever, I just feel better when I know I’m linking back to the original.

And that’s my lecture for today

If you’re curious about which things I’ve pinned: FOLLOW ME

And if you want to add this post to one of your pinboards, just click the ‘pin it’ button below!

Happy Pinning!