For a friend

One of the girls of the CS forum, Isobel, asked for a 6x6 layout for her daughter's birthday. The idea was to tell her something that we wish we had known at her age.

I knew what I wanted to say, but couldn't put it into words, so I went looking for a suitable quote. I quickly found one that summed what I wanted to say, and it was by Lindsay Lohan. Couldn't be someone more different than me, but we surely think the same, at least in one subject.

"Beauty is grace and confidence.
I've learned to accept and appreciate what nature gave me."

I have kept my children's first birthday candles in a high shelf in their bedroom. I wasn't sure about what I wanted to do with them until I saw some deep frames in Dunnes Stores. I decided then to decorate the frame and put the candles inside with. My son's candles were a bit boring and only a few (he's 2) so I added a photo of him to make it more interesting. There was this rather cute of photo of him and he was so angelic looking that it was begging for a couple of wings.

The wings are "With Wings Alpha" by Katie Pertiet at Designer Digitals and includes an alphabet and 2 sets of wings.

I showed the frame to my daughter and she wants wings too. She wants to be a fairy, of course!

Calibrating your monitor

One of the things that bugs me is that sometimes my photo looks perfect in the computer but when I print it it looks much darker that I expected.

Brendan, from work, seemed to know a lot about printers so I asked him about it. He very kindly showed me some of his photos and explained what I could do to get better photos prints. I should have taken a notebook with me, as I forgot lots of what he said but two things stuck in my mind. Calibrate your monitor and calibrate your printer.

The second one I am still getting around to do it, but the first step was surprisingly easy and if you have Adobe Photoshop, or Elements like I do, it should be easy for you too. With PS/PSE, comes a software called Adobe Gamma, which helps your to calibrate your monitor manualy. Auccording to the Adobe website, it doesn't work with LCD screens, like mine's, but I was happy with what I got. Try and you will see it.

You should be able to find Adobe Gamma in your Control Panel, but somehow it wasn't installed in my laptop so I got the PSE installation CD, browsed it and found it in the goodies directory.

Went googling for it, and found another scrap blog that talks about Adobe Gamma.

My name

Hybrid Alien might sound like a sci-fi kind of name, but I choose it because I am sort of a hybrid scrapbooker (who mix digi and paper techniques) and alien because I am a foreigner.

When I tried to register, I found another hybrid alien, also from Dublin. Since this other alien is a student, has not been posting for over a year and has a "target audience" completely different from mine, I didn't think he would mind.

Today I made 2 ATCs, both for my friend Sabrina, I don't think she would mind posting them here, since I found her pic in the net anyway. The first one is a "hybrid" and the second one is a digi.

Post number one

Hello!
I have started this blog to help me in my creative process.
I am a scrapbooker and decided to have my own place to show some of the stuff I make and maybe some photographs.

I have made two resolutions lately. First, it is to do at least one creative activity every day and the other is to improve my photographics skills.

I won't be telling anyone about my blog until I have customised it a little bit and posted some of my work, but if you get to come across my blog, hello and welcome!