Book review & Giveaway: Twisted Stitches

The giveaway is now closed!

Twisted Stitches by Phil Davison

I happen to have two copies of  this fantastic book Twisted Stitches by Phil Davison, so I thought I would make someone happy with my second copy!

This book features some fantastic patterns for those who like to show their darker side. The patterns vary between beautiful alternative designs, such as the Day of the Dead skulls and some witty designs such as the pig featured on the front cover, or the Momento Mori bookmark.

Day of the Dead skulls

Twisted Stitches has a guide on how to cross stitch, as well as various guides and sewing patterns for the different finishes in the book. For the larger patterns the book includes separate foldout charts which are stored in the back.

Momento Mori bookmark

Would you like to get your hands on a copy of this book? If so, you can enter my giveaway as follows:

1. Leave a comment!
2. Tweet, blog or share this giveaway in any other way and leave a separate comment letting me know you did and you receive an extra entry.
3. If you refer a friend to this giveaway and they mention your name in their entry you receive an extra entry.

The giveaway with close in two weeks, on Sunday 14 April.

Good luck!

Monster Merch Review & Giveaway

Update: I'd like to thank Monster Merchandise for sending out another t-shirt in my size, so I can enjoy one as well as you!

Today I'm reviewing a t-shirt by UK designer Monster Merchandise. So stick around and let me tell you about it. If you're good and read to the bottom of this post, you can also find out how you can win this t-shirt!

The design I received to review is called Krang Raspberry. I love the cute redesign of Krang, otherwise a pretty horrifying monster from Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles (or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as it's known almost everywhere else!). I find the mix of the horrible with the nice really attractive. The colours are nice and bright, the pink and brown print complements the yellow t-shirt very well.

The quality of the t-shirt itself is very high. The fabric feels nice and soft and is neither too thick nor too thin. The print is not too thick; some prints can be very rigid and lack flexibility, but this one is very flexible, which means it shouldn't crack and peel off.

The other designs available from the Monster Merch store are also very nice, with a mix of cute t-shirts and witty t-shirts, there's something there for almost anybody. My personal favourites are, along with Krang Raspberry, Godzilla and Frankenskell.

I have only two minor negative comments, one is that the t-shirt shouldn't be ironed, according to the care lable, secondly ladies sizes only go up to a large (UK 14-16). So if you're a bigger lady, you'd have to go for men's sizes, which don't always fit properly.

Giveaway

So would you like to own this lovely t-shirt, or know someone who would like it? It's a women's size S, which is about a UK size 10. If you do, you can take part by doing one or more of the following:

1. Leave a comment on this post and let me know what your favourite monster is, cute or otherwise.
2. Check out the Monster Merch site and let me know what your favourite design is.
3. You don't need to be a follower to enter, but you get an extra entry if you are a follower of my blog or of my Facebook page, and leave a comment telling me you are.
4. Tweet or blog about this giveaway, or like it on Facebook, by clicking the link at the bottom of the post, leave a comment and let me know if you have.

You can get an entry for each of those, so that's four entries each you can get.

The giveaway ends next Saturday (15 Dec) evening and the winner will be announced Sunday 16th.

Good luck!

My Memories Suite review

A little while ago I was asked to do a review and giveaway for the My Memories Suite. I've decided to this in two parts; today the review, and in a couple of days the giveaway.

At first I was hesitant to write a review about this software, as it is scrapbooking software, and I'm not a scrapbooker. However, I downloaded the trial version, had a little play around with it and decided it might be quite fun for presenting photos on my blog as I have seen other people do.

Here's a page I made for a few doilies I made over the last week or so. These photos were again taken with that lovely EOS 5D Mark II. 

This is a page with some views of the town we live in, Roermond.

It's quite simple to make some nice pages with the software. I'm not a terribly creative person when it comes to these kinds of things, so I'm sure you guys and gals can come up with something better.

The software itself is very easy to use. There are premade pages, where you just add your own photos and text, you can also design your own pages, which I did. You can choose your own background paper, matting, and embellishments. A limited selection of the papers and embellishments come with the software, you can pay for different kits, and there are also some free kits on the My Memories website, these kits can also be used in software such as Adobe Photoshop.

As well as making single pages with just images, you can make interactive scrapbooks, with videos, music and other sounds and you can make calendars, which can be printed, burnt to DVD or exported to your iPod, so you can share them with your friends.

Now, I do have a couple of criticisms of the software. First of all, you need to have Quicktime installed to run it. I don't like Quicktime, it slows down my computer, and it is constantly bothering me with updates, not just for itself, but it also tries to get me to install Safari and iTunes. Okay, so My Memories can't control what Quicktime does, but for me, the use of Quicktime gives it a little minus mark.

Secondly, and this might just be related to Quicktime running, but the My Memories Suite is quite slow on my computer. I'm running Windows 7 32-bit on a laptop with 1GB of RAM and 80GB of hard disk space. This is on the lower end of supported systems for this software, so if you have anything less than this, you are going to have problems running the software.

Finally, you need to have a very good Internet connection to download this software. I have a decent, not great, connection and I nearly gave up on trying to install the My Memories Suite, in all it took me about two hours to download and install. This is more time than I have ever spent on downloading any other piece of software.

Overall, the My Memories Suite is a nice bit of software. If you like embellishing your photographs and spicing up your videos, you'll have a lot of fun. You do need a decent computer to run it, and a good Internet connection to install it, if you do not purchase the physical disc.

If you'd like any more information on this software check out these links:

Blog- http://blog.mymemories.com/
Facebook- http://www.facebook.com/pages/MyMemories/140359372717593
Twitter- http://twitter.com/#!/mymemoriessuite

The giveaway will be up in the next couple of days. If you're unsure whether you'd want to/be able to use this  software, I suggest checking out the trial version, if you win the giveaway, you won't have to install the software again, you just have to input the registration key. 

If you choose to buy anything off the My Memories website, you can use the following code at check-out to receive $10 off the software, and a $10 voucher to use on the site, STMMMS78498.