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le format make sure you know where it is saved go to the filters menu on the top bar and select distort and then displace you will be asked to choose a file as a displacement map open photo 2 you ll then see another box like the one below try these settings which should produce a very similar effect to the psp one you can t check the image before applying the filter in elements do hope you ve enjoyed this if you d like to buy the book and gain access to the free classes go to www d4daisy com posted by maggie grey at 09 17 6 comments wednesday 30 december 2015 twiddly couching the movie i recently put a video up on my facebook page and have since had lots of requests to put it on my blog for those who don t use facebook it s a bit smaller here than the fb version so if you d like to be my friend that will be fine it s a how to for the twiddly couching method that i used for the treasure keeper on the last page of my new book long diaries and tall tales see pic below it is a really quick and easy way to cover a large area of background i make the little keepers by cutting three pieces of craft vilene which has had painted silk bonded to it into triangles making a pocket inside the front ones at the lower edge and then inserting strands of wire bent into a wiggly shape like this into the pocket buttonhole round the edges and slip stitch them together before attaching your treasure my treasure is a pair of beaded beads given to me by my late friend val campbell harding i will be putting some free classes extensions on the book techniques on the d4daisy books site early in the new year so watch this space posted by maggie grey at 17 46 7 comments monday 21 december 2015 pebeo prisme a new idea the book has been launched on an unsuspecting world and i am a happy bunny the folk on the workshop on the web members facebook page are posting some of their results and it is great fun to see them all i had a query on the pebeo prisme tiles i use these in the book as a header bar for one of my story panels but they are great for all purposes i am currently working on a little book with a patterned surface of prisme this will be one of the first free lessons early in the new year at www d4daisy com for those who have the book this is how the header looks with two inch tiles i use a product called cerne relief around the edges this dries to give a hard raised edging to the tile and allows a deeper application of the prisme paint it occurred to me that pva might work just as well as the relief paint and this is what i did painted a thin coat of pva over a twinchie mountboard square to give a sealed surface and allowed this to dry either pipe a line of pva around the edge if your pva pot had a fine nozzle mine doesn t or paint a thick line of it on non stick baking paper push the edge of the tile into the pva to give a raised border repeat with other sides holding the tile in the centre for the last side or you will get very sticky when all sides are edged with pva allow to dry thoroughly then rub some metallic wax quite thickly over the pva edges gold paint would possibly work just as well but i haven t tried it yet when coloured to your liking apply some of the pebeo prisme paints to the centre using a kebab or cocktail stick after a short time before the paint is quite dry prop it up against a very slightly raised surface i ve just used another tile the paint will slowly drag as it moves a little to give an interesting effect lots more like this in the book folks posted by maggie grey at 16 43 16 comments wednesday 16 december 2015 new book and some free software thank you all for the great welcome back the book has been printed www d4daisy com and i feel as though i can do other things we are really pleased with it and it has more pages than expected the designer fell for nina humphreys artwork and insisted we add a page or two see right in the book i do use the printer for some of the effects as i love the look and feel of paper and it is much stronger than you might imagine combining printouts with traditional drawing techniques is huge fun and i have several step by steps that feature this there isn t much use of image programs in long diaries as it is so difficult to find one that everyone uses however i have found a splendid totally free program called paint net it is quite free quick to download and seems extremely stable just google on paint net for details i think it may be more windows based than mac as it a development of the very basic paint program that comes free with the windows operating system it really is the easiest software for layers which often cause hassle i have used this part stitched image in the book printed on ordinary printer paper and crumpled it has hand stitching added here is a tutorial on how to do it in paint net 1 go to the file menu and select open choose a suitable image trees work particularly well go to the layer menu in the top bar and click on duplicate layer note that the image will appear in the layers box on the right repeat step 2 so that three layers are showing in the layers box click on the middle layer so that it is highlighted 5 go to the adjustment menu on the top bar and choose invert colours this will change the colours of the middle layer only but you won t see a difference yet 6 in the layers box on the right click on the top layer at the bottom right of the layers box is a powerful little button called properties see arrow click on this and a box will appear click on the little arrow mode and choose the option difference y ou will see how the image has changed good fun eh 9 when you have finished playing either save in the native format pdn to keep the layers intact or merge them down in the layers menu by clicking merge layers down do this twice to flatten the image and save as a jpg i promised to show some ideas for making text looked distressed but i think this is enough for now and i will be back soon with ideas for mock calligraphy posted by maggie grey at 12 54 4 comments friday 4 december 2015 the story so far here i am again just when you all thought i d gone for good i do have valid reasons for the non writing of the blog for much of this year there are so many excuses in fact that i could offer you a bullet list you have already heard some of them but i am determined to extract the maximum amount of sympathy so i m listing them all if you wish to escape my hard luck story skip to here here is a pretty pic of a detail of some recent work to keep you going it has been a dispiriting year for many small businesses beginning with the eu inspired digital vat disaster this was aimed at collecting overseas vat from mega businesses selling online but most of those have managed to evade it while the smaller ones such as one person selling knitting patterns was caught in a bureau cratic nightmare that saw many small businesses ceasing trading we had no sooner got over that than the company that organises our credit card facilities for wow and d4daisy changed some protocols involving costly and time consuming work as a result of these requirements we took the opportunity to restructure workshop on the web and that took months of deeds of variation and form filling however it did involve both fiona and sam taking a more in depth role and that perked wow up immensely with a member only blog and facebook page we now have lots of extra content with more workshops and product reviews kits for the workshops and lots of contact with members we love to see their work which is classy stuff as you can see from this pic by mardi robson based on a lynda monk workshop that was a popular kit which included one of lynda s silkscreens we even have the odd video all this has resulted in increased subscriptions so wow is safe once more i think everything is on an even keel again now but i have felt as though much of this year has been spent tied to a desk or a telephone and it was all rather depressing in the end we have a better business model and are more secure so there is a silver lining i have been able to get in enough stitching to produce a new book due out shortly it was supposed to be out in february march but the work was getting finished much more quickly than expected so we decided to make a monumental effort and publish before christmas it s at the printers so should be around next week sometime i have so enjoyed working on it as i have taken a new direction with a theme of diaries and story telling wowies will recognise my long diary subject of an article a while ago i had so much feedback that it prompted me to explore the theme further in a book it s the story telling that has really got me hooked and i have been working on a theme of myth and legend in addition to my own textiles i have included work by some of my friends and they have turned into characters in the book here you can see a wonderful oil pastel work by my good friend jane wild this chap became the hero of a tale about a band of travellers seeking peace island to bring peace to the world god knows that we need it right now he rather took over the story which resulted in a completely different direction to the one i had planned but he did engineer a happy ending it was a good ending for me too as jane has given him to me so i shall get him framed very soon i intend to pursue this theme of fantasy through several more pieces of work and make some illustrated stitched books as usual there are lots of techniques one of which involves making pressure stencilled patterns on silk i spoke about this in my last blog but have developed more ideas val campbell harding and i did this for a book once but i ve developed it further the beginning is very simple you just paint a piece of silk and while wet place a plastic stencil on top as this was for a piece about a mythical wood i used a clarity stencil tree design putting a weight over the stencil as it dries caused interesting effects i have then scanned the resulting pattern into a paint program and worked on it by changing the colours and highlighting different areas such fun and i shall be putting how i do it posts on here and the d4daisy books web site when the book is out i am really excited about continuing the theme and as i have an exhibition coming up at art van go in march and a progress to scotland in april there will be chances to show the work i shall also be at craft4crafters in exeter in february a busy time ahead now the book is done there is a lot of catching up for christmas so i m off to hit the shops tomorrow our unaccompanied singing group local vocals is performing at the local stately home so we will be feeling very christmassy after that i will be back soon i promise i ll need to tell you when the book is here posted by maggie grey at 12 45 11 comments tuesday 30 june 2015 myths magic and muddle another long gap between blogs mostly due to bureaucracy hence the word muddle in the title we decided that we should change the base of the workshop on the web partnership to recognise the role that fiona and not forgetting sam play same business just a new name added it involved the restructuring of practically every aspect of the business including re applying and being approved all over again for everything from the bank account to the taking of credit cards it all went through ok but they took a mighty long time to do it it must be even harder for people with brand new businesses at least we had a good track record i shall spare you the unrelated saga about changing to a shopping cart system on our web page in order to offer kits thanks to the amazing fiona dix who hosts our site we can now offer kits through wow our first accompanied my article on silk carrier rods backed by metal shim however i think we have made it through the dense thickets of corporate clumsiness and it may even have been responsible for a whole new design theme i am exploring in the middle of it all i had no time for stitch so i went back to drawing while doodling i drew a landscape with high cliffs guarded by a barrier mysterious then i found by chance the facebook page of symphony of shadows masks some great work there she recommended a book mythago wood by robert holdfast and guess what it is all about a mysterious wood with barriers and cliffs it is deeper than that on so many levels working on the premise that we create our own mythical figures and settings based on old folk memories a tough but gripping read so i have started a design book based on that book and plan a series of stitched textiles when i have finished working through the ideas i m exploring in drawing and paint this page right represents the myth of the green man a leafy creature that i am longing to stitch if i thought about him within the confines of mythago wood he would become real and probably quite threatening he looks a bit cross the whole thing coincides rather wonderfully with some work i started in the cut shape stitch book i invented a race of warriors and lion like beings and they are very at home in this land of myth and magic i found a wonderful pebeo paint called prisme which gives the mottled metallic effect in the warrior below left you can also see the work in progress on some of the other pages many are coloured by laying stencils some commercial some of my own on wet paper weights are placed on parts of the stencil to change the take up of the paint val ch and i used to call them pressure stencils blogger is refusing to let me place any of the pics where i want them but you get the idea i also tried some of the spectrum noir alcohol markers that sam packer reviewed in the last issue of wow they come with a fine point at one end and a chisel shape at the other great for mark making you can see it on the warrior s face and the landscape below him i used the brother scan n cut to cut out a tree and in the pic below am filling the shapes with prisme this is one of the characters from the book she enters the wood to search for her brother i might use her for an icon type textile she is very suitable well that is all for now my mythical wood calls me but i hope to be back soon posted by maggie grey at 17 39 6 comments older posts home subscribe to posts atom long diaries tall tales new book now available click the pic cut shape stitch the latest book approaches to stitch six great artists dissolvable delights maggie s new book lynda monk s new book exploring creative surfaces workshop on the web free taster click the pic for the wesite amazing d4daisy books click the pic for the website labels catalogue killing 1 1 catalogue killing 2 icon 1 catalogue lesson 3 1 catalogues nearly ripe 1 clone tool tutorial 1 d4daisy class 1 displacement and the select tool 1 displacement maps 1 displacement maps in paint shop pro 1 flower stitcher tutorial 1 1 genetics of the fruit bowl 1 inkaid 1 layers in photoshop elements 1 making a spiral book 1 paintshop pro layers 1 silly wrapping 1 swoopy 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