Dear Friend Charity Collaboration

We have a dear friend and fellow designer that has been diagnosed with leukemia. She has missed a lot of work and so designers from Scraps N Pieces and Stuff to Scrap have come together to put together a fund raising kit to benefit our Dear Friend. She is a great designer and a good friend to all of us. She is having to take a break right now from work and from designing to take care of herself and we hope the funds raised from this template pack will help benefit her in some small way and show our appreciation to her for all she has done to help and support us.

This template pack contains 40 - 12x12 templates and 4 - 8.5 x 11 templates in PSD, TIF, PNG, and PAGE formats. You will get tons of use from them and be able to use them over and over again. Be sure to tell your friends to come pick up this great deal on some awesome templates and help out our friend in the meantime. Template pack is $15 regularly, but on sale for $11.99 right now. That makes it less than 30cents per template!

Here are a couple of super cute layouts made with a couple of these templates

Templates: Love 'Em or Hate 'Em?

Just recently I've found a love for templates. I haven't been digiscrapping all that long, especially compared to seasoned scrappers, but from the beginning I had an aversion to using templates. I'm not exactly sure why. It may have been because I felt like the resulting layout wasn't truly mine or that I was somehow stinting my creativity by using templates--maybe both. In spite of my feelings, I've used them a few times, whether for CT assignments or template challenges in forums, but just recently I bought a pack and used a couple of templates simply out of time constraints. Since I've started designing, I really haven't had much scrap time--something that I definitely need to find balance for because I still really love scrapping.

So just yesterday I was using these templates I'd purchased, and I discovered something wonderful. It's something that lots of people say--that templates are simply meant as a guide to help you construct your layout, but that concept finally sank in for me as I started with the template and slowly worked it into my own layout. The foundation was there, but with my added touches, it truly became my layout. I've also realized that having really amazing templates (used templates from  the very talented Sara aka Zinnias and Swallowtails and Marie H Designs) did wonders for my attitude toward them! I was so pleasantly surprised.

Any template lovers out there? Who are your favorite template designers? Any template haters? On the fence? Tell me what you think! :-)