DIY Disney's Haunted Mansion Halloween Decor | Hitchhiking Ghost Windows

It's officially time to start thinking about Halloween Decor! I am running one of my favorite Halloween posts today! Enjoy!

 When it comes to Halloween, I like the tamer side of things. I think that's why I gravitate to Disney's Haunted Mansion. It's spooky and fun without traveling into horror in any way. That's my idea of Halloween. And so we tend to be the Haunted Mansion house in our neighborhood, in that we play a CD of the area music, have a fog machine, carve our pumpkins to resemble the hitchhiking ghosts, and now, we will have the same hitchhikers in our windows!

I created these Haunted Mansion Hitchhiking Ghosts PNG files using photoshop. If you would like to purchase them for your own uses (scrapbooking or otherwise) you can find them in my Etsy shop. For this project, I simply imported the shapes to my Silhouette Studio software. I traced them using the trace tool and cut them out of adhesive vinyl. Remember when you are cutting out anything with words, think about reversing the image before you cut it. It depends on whether you want them to be legible to those in the house, or those on the street.

Once they are cut use the transfer paper to adhere them to the windows. I did not and wound up tearing off the middle hitchhiker's arm at the elbow. I just pieced it together again, but it was disconcerting! Now you're done! You have recreated the ghosts in the graveyard scene from the Haunted Mansion attraction! For a sharp silhouette, pull the blinds or the sheer curtains and turn on all the lights in the room so the light shines through, but the rest of the room is obscured from view. I can't wait to see how many trick-or-treaters (or their parents) recognize our grim grinning ghosts!

Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney Scrapbook Layout | Anatomy of a Disney Enthusiast

Rerunning one of my favorite scrapbook layouts with updated links for the brushes! Enjoy.



You all know I am a Disney scrapbooker, and I am absolutely in love with this Disney Enthusiast layout! Partially because I designed the entire thing; partially because Doc has never been scrapped so perfectly! My inspiration for this layout came from a very clever resume I saw via Pinterest. I knew that I wanted to do this for Doc at the very least, I am still hoping to get it done for all of us Disney fanatics in the cottage! Maybe I'll select one of us each trip for this treatment. It wasn't too hard to do and it's a fun surprise in the midst of my project life layouts.

Here's how I did it. I work in Photoshop CS5 (If you know a student who can purchase this for you, you can same a bundle!). I took a photo of Doc that showed his entire body and converted it to black and white. I then used the marquee tool to create the white boxes. Once I had them in place I used my custom shape tool and my brushed to create the smaller icons. You can find my Disney Mountain Range Digital Brushes here, free for personal use. You can find my Disney Snacks Digital Brushes here, also free for personal use. If you can't find the custom shape you are looking for, simply google "free custom shapes photoshop" and a whole host of options should come up.

If you decide to do this too, I'd love to see what you come up with. Send me and link, tag me on Instagram, or leave me a comment here. Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney Tote Bags

The links for the posters in this post are no longer available. But you can find some great Disney poster art on the Disney Movie Rewards website under digital rewards. They seem to rotate in and out with some regularity, but if you keep a look out, you can find some very fun and unique stuff in there! And of course you can run an Etsy search to see what else might be out there. Enjoy this rerun of one of my favorite Disney gift ideas!

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Breaking up is hard to do, and it's always hardest when we have to say goodbye to Walt Disney World. We all tend to be tired and cranky, and we usually like to maximize our time there, so we are leaving on the last plane home - our friends like to call it the Disney Express. It's a plane filled with other tired, cranky, bloody stumps of people. I think it's incredibly important to have a little something special for the ride home.


I decided to make these cute little tote bags for each kid for "leaving day." I filled them with homemade Rice Krispie treats, a game to pass the time, and a few other little treats I found along the way. If you have a dining plan with snacks left on it, this is a great way to use them up. Stop by any gift shop and pick up bags of pretzels or other packaged goodies that fit within the plan.

For the tote bags I used Transfer MAGIC's Inkjet Transfer Paper for Light Colored, Light Weight Fabrics. I still got a plasticy finish to the transfer, but on the canvas bags, it was fine. The images are from the same series of vintage Disney poster images through Nukes at Etsy. These are top quality and big, so at a dollar an image, you can't go wrong. I used Photoshop to size and reverse the image for transfer. If you have text on your image, DON'T FORGET TO REVERSE your design before you print!

I found these tote bags fairly inexpensively at Hobby Lobby. I found a 4 pack for $8.00. (If you use your 40% off coupon, they are really a steal!) They are 100% cotton canvas, and the iron-on paper worked beautifully on them. Since I already had the transfer paper they were only $3.00 a bag. That's a price I can live with!

Leaving The Mouse is never easy, but a little goodie bag can help ease the transition home. Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney Monorail Scavenger Hunt Cards

I've always had a love-affair with the monorail system in Walt Disney World. It's magical in it's own right, and such a cool way to travel! As a kid I longed to stay in the Contemporary Resort so we could see the monorail swishing through the concourse on a regular basis.

And as a kid, we always played a monorail version of the license plate game, keeping track of the different colors we'd seen. Today there are twelve monorails operating in WDW. Rarely are they all on-line at once. But if you are lucky, you could see most of the following: Red, Orange, Yellow, Gold, Peach, Coral, Green, Lime, Blue, Teal, Silver and Black.

In the spirit of making the most of our wait time (there can be A LOT of wait time in Disney, depending on your travel dates), I created these scratch-off cards for the kids in our party. I used a heavy card stock to print these, and I would recommend making several extras as you may need them for those adults kids who tend to lose theirs in the parks, or for a learning curve with the scratch-off paint.

Then, I used this tutorial from Artmind to make scratch-off paint. A couple of tips regarding the scratch-off paint: 1.) It bubbled up when I applied it, but most of the bubbles went away as it dried. The more you agitate the paint, the more bubbles you will get. 2.) A lighter color of paint is recommended. I used copper and it didn't scratch off cleanly - as you can see in the photo below. The gold was much better.

To create the actual card, I used a scanned image of the monorail from a promotional Disney flyer. You may want to clean up the edges of the image in Photoshop. To create the different colored monorails, I selected the color stripe so it could be changed to the different colors I needed. Due to copyright laws, I can do this for my own personal use, but not, I am sorry to say, to distribute it to others. Therefore, I cannot offer you a PDF as I would like to. I can, however, refer you to my March 5th post about how to select an image and create a PNG from your own photo, and this tutorial on how to select an area of a scanned image in Photoshop and change its color. It was much easier than it sounds. Give it a try. And remember that if you are scaling down your image significantly, you will not have to be so worried about little detail areas that don't look right on a larger scale. Some of them just disappear. Don't stress yourself out about the little things.

Of course, it was only logical that each kid got a pressed penny to use as a scratch-off tool! The edge was perfect for removing the paint. I hope you give this scavenger hunt a try. We had a blast using them. Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust.

DIY Disney Pixar's Toy Story Birthday Party | Creating A Digital Invitation

There are a lot of invitations available on Etsy if you are not so inclined as to create your own. But I love creating this sort of thing, AND I wanted something that could be used in a text message. I don't know about you, but texting is a huge part of my life and seems easier for moms in my circle to use than anything else. I also seem to get an RSVP from most everyone. And since we all send a very informal "save the date" message via text anyway, it seemed logical to just have the invite be a text and let that be that!

If you are inclined to want to do this, here is how I created this invitation.

Start with a 4" x 5" canvas in photoshop.

I used a selection of scrapbooking supplies from two sources: Papelland's Toy Story Collection and Frontier from Project Mouse. Select the plaid paper and size it to your background. Remember it's going to be on a digital screen, so don't make it so small the checkers go all funny on your eyes.

Select a custom shape; I chose this 8-pointed star frame. In a new layer, create the frame in any color. Move the cow print paper onto the shape and reduce the size the same way you did for the background. Then group the paper to the shape (paper layer on top of the shape layer). Your shape should now be filled with this cow print. To outline it, use the stroke function.

To create the inner star, I selected the same custom shape, but the solid version, and made it in white. Then I layered on the cloud paper and changed the opacity to about 30%.

Making the script was fairly simple. I already had the Gill Sans font. Bump it up to Extra Bold and use the stroke function to create the blue border. Then use the emboss function to make it stand out. I then drew a red rectangle behind the word "turns" and used the skew function in the transform menu to shape it like the Toy Story logo.

And that pretty well sums it up! I love having something so easy and it will transition to the scrapbook with no trouble at all! Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney Scrapbook Layout | Anatomy of a Disney Enthusiast

You all know I am a Disney scrapbooker, and I am absolutely in love with this Disney Enthusiast layout! Partially because I designed the entire thing; partially because Doc has never been scrapped so perfectly! My inspiration for this layout came from a very clever resume I saw via Pinterest. I knew that I wanted to do this for Doc at the very least, I am still hoping to get it done for all of us Disney fanatics in the cottage! Maybe I'll select one of us each trip for this treatment. It wasn't too hard to do and it's a fun surprise in the midst of my project life layouts.

Here's how I did it. I work in Photoshop CS5 (If you know a student who can purchase this for you, you can same a bundle!). I took a photo of Doc that showed his entire body and converted it to black and white. I then used the marquee tool to create the white boxes. Once I had them in place I used my custom shape tool and my brushed to create the smaller icons. You can find my Disney Mountain Range Digital Brushes here, free for personal use. You can find my Disney Snacks Digital Brushes here, also free for personal use. If you can't find the custom shape you are looking for, simply google "free custom shapes photoshop" and a whole host of options should come up.

If you decide to do this too, I'd love to see what you come up with. Send me and link, tag me on Instagram, or leave me a comment here. Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney's Haunted Mansion Halloween Decor | Hitchhiking Ghost Windows

 When it comes to Halloween, I like the tamer side of things. I think that's why I gravitate to Disney's Haunted Mansion. It's spooky and fun without traveling into horror in any way. That's my idea of Halloween. And so we tend to be the Haunted Mansion house in our neighborhood, in that we play a CD of the area music, have a fog machine, carve our pumpkins to resemble the hitchhiking ghosts, and now, we will have the same hitchhikers in our windows!

I created these Haunted Mansion Hitchhiking Ghosts PNG files using photoshop. If you would like to purchase them for your own uses (scrapbooking or otherwise) you can find them in my Etsy shop. For this project, I simply imported the shapes to my Silhouette Studio software. I traced them using the trace tool and cut them out of adhesive vinyl. Remember when you are cutting out anything with words, think about reversing the image before you cut it. It depends on whether you want them to be legible to those in the house, or those on the street.

Once they are cut use the transfer paper to adhere them to the windows. I did not and wound up tearing off the middle hitchhiker's arm at the elbow. I just pieced it together again, but it was disconcerting! Now you're done! You have recreated the ghosts in the graveyard scene from the Haunted Mansion attraction! For a sharp silhouette, pull the blinds or the sheer curtains and turn on all the lights in the room so the light shines through, but the rest of the room is obscured from view. I can't wait to see how many trick-or-treaters (or their parents) recognize our grim grinning ghosts!

Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney's Haunted Mansion Hitchhiking Ghost Crafts

I love vintage Disney, there's no denying it. So the Haunted Mansion is always a must do for me. And despite my disbelief, the Halloween and fall decor is already showing up in the craft stores! So I figure it's not too early to introduce a new product in my Etsy shop: Three Hitchhiking Ghosts PNG files.

What I love about these is that you can do just about anything you want with them - except sell them. You can create your own digital scrapbook pages, you could print them for your Project Life pages, you could print them and make cards, you can convert them to digital brushes, you could import them into your Silhouette software and make vinyl shapes, etched glass, gift tags, you name it! And you have plenty of time before Halloween is here to make your ideas a reality!

You will receive 4 digital files, each ghost separately and one image of all three of them together. I figure you just never know what you might need until you start crafting. These grim grinning ghosts are for personal use only, but please do share with us what you create with them! We love to see what our readers come up with. Tag us on Instagram (@MerryweathersCottage) or post here in the comments. Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney Snack Digital Brushes

For those of you digital scrappers out there, here is another free digital download! Ive said it before and I'll say it again: I love scrapbooking. I don't get to do it as often as I like, as I am sure is the case for most of us! I especially love digital scrapping. I love not having to leave a mess out, being able to customize the colors and sizes of things, and in general, making my layouts exactly the way I want them. But as I have said before, it can be hard to find Disney themed digital scrapbooking elements. So the DIYer in me has to get a little creative in this department if I don't want all my pages to look the same. And when you travel to Disney as much as we do, that can happen quickly.


If you are a digital scrapbooker too, then you know how fantastic brushes can be. Brushes are shapes that can be customized with texture, pattern, and color so that they can look like stickers, chipboard, metal, or a host of other scrapbook elements. They can even become a frame for your photo! The thing is, brushes are not hard to make if you have a little knowledge of Photoshop. If you'd like to try it yourself, check out this helpful brush-making tutorial. I was able to make three of these brushes in less than 5 minutes each. And now I have them to use in all my layouts! AND, so do you! I'm sharing my brushes with you as a FREE DOWNLOAD, for personal use only. Follow this link to download these free Disney Snacks Brushes.

I am working on an entire scrapbooking kit, but that will have to wait for another time. It's coming along though, so hopefully I'll be posting it sooner, rather than later! Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney Mountain Range Digital Scrapbooking Brushes

Disney Mountain Ranges Photoshop Brushes

I love scrapbooking. I don't get to do it as often as I like, as I am sure is the case for most of us! I especially love digital scrapping. I love not having to leave a mess out, being able to customize the colors and sizes of things, and in general, making my layouts exactly the way I want them. But as I have said before, it can be hard to find Disney themed digital scrapbooking elements. So the DIYer in me has to get a little creative in this department if I don't want all my pages to look the same. And when you travel to Disney as much as we do, that can happen quickly.

If you are a digital scrapbooker too, then you know how fantastic brushes can be. Brushes are shapes that can be customized with texture, pattern, and color so that they can look like stickers, chipboard, metal, or a host of other scrapbook elements. They can even become a frame for your photo! The thing is, brushes are not hard to make if you have a little knowledge of Photoshop. If you'd like to try it yourself, check out this helpful brush-making tutorial. I was able to make three of these brushes from Mr. Photos From The Parks's personal photos in less than 5 minutes each. (Space Mountain took me a little more time!) And now I have them to use in all my layouts! AND, so do you! I'm sharing my brushes with you as a FREE DOWNLOAD, for personal use only. Just click on the photo caption above to download these brushes now. For you Disneyland aficionados, I apologize for not having the Matterhorn available. Never having been to Disneyland, I am without my own photo of that attraction. Something for the Disney Bucket List!

I am working on an entire scrapbooking kit, but that will have to wait for another time. It's coming along though, so hopefully I'll be posting it sooner, rather than later! Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney's Dumbo Poster T-shirt & Pants

I'm a HUGE fan of the Dumbo ride. (And if you haven't seen the refurbished Dumbo ride & Storybook Circus, you are MISSING OUT! It's the best refurb to date.) I may have been accused of having more children, just so I have a good excuse to spend my days in Fantasyland. Not that one really needs an excuse; unless said person is dragging a tween boy around to all the "kiddie" rides. SO uncool. Nevertheless, this project was inspired by my affection for the lovable elephant.

For this T-shirt project, I originally used Transfer MAGIC's Inkjet Transfer Paper for Light Colored, Light Weight Fabrics. I still got a plasticy finish to the transfer, which I hate wearing, but the image looks perfect. Unfortunately, the design peeled off after one wearing in the Florida heat. I was so disappointed that when I got home I immediately made a new T-shirt using Lesley Riley's TAP Transfer Artist Paper. It's FAR superior to anything else I have used. And the transfer is just as sharp. I will be using this for the rest of my transfer projects for sure. You can see a close up in the bottom photo.

I purchased a series of vintage Disney poster images through Nukes at Etsy. These are top quality and big, so at a dollar an image, you can't go wrong. Because this is a jpeg, I used Photoshop to size and reverse the image for transfer. My Silhouette SD has trouble importing jpegs; perhaps the other models, or newer software has made this easier? I wouldn't know.

Fabric for these pants is from Spoonflower: Circus Elephants by pennycandy. And the pants pattern is Anna Maria Horner's Quick Change Trousers, because I truly can't get enough of them.

Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

It's A Small World Kids Room: Subway Art

As a lover of graphic art, and a dabbler myself, this trend in Subway Art rocks my world. I just had to make some for our new Small World Room. In fact, with all those international farewell's already laid out for me, it was downright impossible to ignore. It's like this project was calling out my name. So, I skimmed over several of our vacation photos and found the words I wanted to use. I also referenced them for the fonts I chose. I mean really, how much easier does it get?

If you've never been through It's A Small World (which I find extremely hard to imagine, unless you are preparing for your first trip, in which case, I salute you for your admirable choice in vacation spots and blog reading), here is what you see at the end of the ride:

So how did I do it? It was simple. Measure the wall area on which you are going to hang the print. You can easily prints made at standard sizes, 11x14, 16x20, 20x30, so choose the size that works best for you. Don't forget to factor in the frame when deciding which size you want to use. I chose to use Shutterfly as my vendor. I had used them before to print posters for Doc's room, and I had a coupon to use. If money is an issue, shop around. You can find a good deal at many print shops. And don't forget to check out Staples and Office Depot. They usually have print centers.

To make your own subway art, open a document in Photoshop the size of the print you wish to make. Type each word in a separate text box. This gives you the ability to move them around and change fonts easily. Size them all to the margins you require. I used about an inch of white space all around so I would have room to mat and frame it. Then start playing around with fonts. As I said before, I had photos to reference, so that was helpful. And as a font enthusiast (and avid scrapbooker), I have a vast library of fonts to choose from (most of which I downloaded for free). If you need to find fonts, just search fonts on pinterest. You'll be swimming in them.

Fonts I used for this project (from top to bottom):
Eccentric Standard
Heavy Heap
Pepper
Wren
Rosewood Standard
Water Street
Ornatique
Mary Jane Tankard
Bimini

I hope your attempts at making subway art are as fun as this was for me! Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney Tote Bags

Breaking up is hard to do, and it's always hardest when we have to say goodbye to Walt Disney World. We all tend to be tired and cranky, and we usually like to maximize our time there, so we are leaving on the last plane home - our friends like to call it the Disney Express. It's a plane filled with other tired, cranky, bloody stumps of people. I think it's incredibly important to have a little something special for the ride home.


I decided to make these cute little tote bags for each kid for "leaving day." I filled them with homemade Rice Krispie treats, a game to pass the time, and a few other little treats I found along the way. If you have a dining plan with snacks left on it, this is a great way to use them up. Stop by any gift shop and pick up bags of pretzels or other packaged goodies that fit within the plan.

For the tote bags I used Transfer MAGIC's Inkjet Transfer Paper for Light Colored, Light Weight Fabrics. I still got a plasticy finish to the transfer, but on the canvas bags, it was fine. The images are from the same series of vintage Disney poster images through Nukes at Etsy. These are top quality and big, so at a dollar an image, you can't go wrong. I used Photoshop to size and reverse the image for transfer. If you have text on your image, DON'T FORGET TO REVERSE your design before you print!

I found these tote bags fairly inexpensively at Hobby Lobby. I found a 4 pack for $8.00. (If you use your 40% off coupon, they are really a steal!) They are 100% cotton canvas, and the iron-on paper worked beautifully on them. Since I already had the transfer paper they were only $3.00 a bag. That's a price I can live with!

Leaving The Mouse is never easy, but a little goodie bag can help ease the transition home. Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

Disney DIY Flip Book: Spinner Page

As I have mentioned before, one of my tactics for enjoying Walt Disney World is curtailing the complaining when it comes to waiting. Our kids seem to be particularly adept at complaining in "the happiest place on earth." Of course, there is a direct link from tired to whiny. Something to thoughtful consider when planning your fun. In my vigilant attempt to keep the whining at bay, I created a flip book for our kids to use in the parks this year. It was a time-consuming project, but the prospect of happy children made it worth the effort. (You could always skip the flip book and just make one of these to have on hand, if you wanted to make it easier on yourself!)

For this page, I created a waiting game spinner. It was incredibly simple using Photoshop, card stock, cardboard, and some spinner arrows I found here, but you could just google "4-inch arrow spinners" and see what you come up with; I like to shop around for the best deal.

I made this the last page of the flip book, so it could adhere to the sturdy cardboard cover. Once I had created my spinner in Photoshop, I sized it to my flip book (5x7) and printed as many copies as I needed (8). May I humbly recommend that you make at least one extra? These tend to have a way of falling out monorail window vents, over balconies, and the like. (Not that those things happened to us.)

Inserting the spinner was a little tricky. I would recommend punching a hole in the paper and then cutting extra slits around the hole to get the large base flat against the back of the paper. This way, your spinner will spin freely. (If you look closely at the photo on the left you can see the slits.) You can always practice this on a scrap piece of paper first.

Ta-da! You now have a boredom buster at your fingertips - just don't forget it in the room! And if you'd like to use my spinner page, you can download it here for free.


Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!

DIY Disney Monorail Scavenger Hunt Cards

I've always had a love-affair with the monorail system in Walt Disney World. It's magical in it's own right, and such a cool way to travel! As a kid I longed to stay in the Contemporary Resort so we could see the monorail swishing through the concourse on a regular basis.

And as a kid, we always played a monorail version of the license plate game, keeping track of the different colors we'd seen. Today there are twelve monorails operating in WDW. Rarely are they all on-line at once. But if you are lucky, you could see most of the following: Red, Orange, Yellow, Gold, Peach, Coral, Green, Lime, Blue, Teal, Silver and Black.

In the spirit of making the most of our wait time (there can be A LOT of wait time in Disney, depending on your travel dates), I created these scratch-off cards for the kids in our party. I used a heavy card stock to print these, and I would recommend making several extras as you may need them for those adults kids who tend to lose theirs in the parks, or for a learning curve with the scratch-off paint.

Then, I used this tutorial from Artmind to make scratch-off paint. A couple of tips regarding the scratch-off paint: 1.) It bubbled up when I applied it, but most of the bubbles went away as it dried. The more you agitate the paint, the more bubbles you will get. 2.) A lighter color of paint is recommended. I used copper and it didn't scratch off cleanly - as you can see in the photo below. The gold was much better.

To create the actual card, I used a scanned image of the monorail from a promotional Disney flyer. You may want to clean up the edges of the image in Photoshop. To create the different colored monorails, I selected the color stripe so it could be changed to the different colors I needed. Due to copyright laws, I can do this for my own personal use, but not, I am sorry to say, to distribute it to others. Therefore, I cannot offer you a PDF as I would like to. I can, however, refer you to my March 5th post about how to select an image and create a PNG from your own photo, & this tutorial on how to select an area of a scanned image in Photoshop and change its color. It was much easier than it sounds. Give it a try. And remember that if you are scaling down your image significantly, you will not have to be so worried about little detail areas that don't look right on a larger scale. Some of them just disappear. Don't stress yourself out about the little things.

Of course, it was only logical that each kid got a pressed penny to use as a scratch-off tool! The edge was perfect for removing the paint. I hope you give this scavenger hunt a try. We had a blast using them. Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust.

DIY Disney Digital Scrapbook Embellishments

There seems to be a wealth of Disney related scrapbooking products on the market, that is, until you start looking for something for your digital scrapbook. Perhaps it's the fear of copyright infringement, or the small market. Whatever the cause, I have difficulty finding new Disney embellishments for our annual trips. I decided to take matters into my own hands.

I happen to live with an incredible Disney photographer, who is well aware of my passion for scrapping. For years, he has been taking photos for his awesome blog, Photos From The Parks. (You should follow his blog. It'll get you through till your next trip.) I have been the lucky beneficiary of said photos for some amazing scrapbook pages. And when I was looking for something special for my Polynesian spread, I realized he had taken exactly the photo I needed to create my own page embellishment. 

If you're a digital scrapbooker, chances are you are somewhat familiar with Photoshop (or Elements). I realize "familiar" has a wide spectrum. I'll try to make this as simple as I can. This tutorial uses CS5 on a Mac.

Tutorial:

I would recommend starting with a copy of a digital photo of an icon or sign that has very simple edges. Cleaning up an intricate image can be time consuming and a bit frustrating. Simple shapes are easier to use. I suggest a copy so that if the worst happens and you have to just delete and start over, you haven't lost your original. I speak from experience. And remember, you can always hit [Command+Z] to undo.

1. Open your image in Photoshop. Check to see if the image is locked (there will be a small padlock icon next to your image in the layers palette if it is). If it is locked, click on the image in the layers palette and drag it onto the paper icon (create a new layer) - circled in yellow in the picture below. This should create a duplicate image with no lock. You can now drag the locked layer into the trash (circled in red).

2. Using your quick selection tool (circled in red in the picture below), click on the image you want to use. You should see "marching ants" - a dotted moving line - around the image. If it didn't select all that you wanted, just continue clicking on the areas it should select until everything you want has been enclosed. 

You will notice that the tool didn't select it perfectly and added a bit of white space I don't want (circled in yellow in the image above). That's fine. It will easily be edited out later. Don't worry about it.

3. To get rid of the rest of the image, use the shortcut [Command+Shift+I] - this will invert the marching ants and you should now see them around your selected image and the perimeter of the original image. Hit delete. You should now see just your selected image and a transparent background.

4. To get rid of the marching ants, click on the Marqee tool (circled in red below) and then click on your image. The marching ants should now be gone.

5. Now we need to clean up the edge of this image, specifically the part I've circled in yellow above.

6. Zoom in on your image until it reads 100% (in the image below, it's circled in yellow in the bottom left corner). Then select your eraser tool (circled in red in the image below). You may need to adjust the size of the eraser tool. To do this, pull down the menu circled in green. The number refers to pixels. If you want a larger eraser, slide the size slider to the right. For a smaller eraser, slide it to the left. Now you can begin erasing the part of your image you do not want. I recommend a smaller eraser near the edge of your image. It gives you more control.

7. Once you have an image you are happy with, go to "Save As" in your File menu and save as PNG. I like to reopen the PNG once I've saved it to make sure it looks like I want it to. When reopened it should look like this:

The bounding box shows you exactly what will come up when you are scrapbooking. And you're all set! The image is ready to be used as a scrapbooking embellishment.

Photoshop can be confusing, so let me know if you have any questions about this tutorial and I will try and clear things up as best I can. For those of you who need to know: this image was taken in the Polynesian room of It's A Small World. Until next time, may all your days be filled with fairy dust!