Creating digital "Papers" and more Fantasy Layouts

Since my husband was away all day last Saturday, Andrea and I spent the day at my mom's. While we were there, I was showing my mom and my niece the digital scrapbook pages I've been making when my niece made a request: Can I make one of her with fairies?

I just downloaded glass container images from Osa Honey Designs and I remembered the only fairy toy Andrea has: her Tinkerbell lantern (a toy lantern with Tinkerbell inside). I decided to make something like that and ended up with this:

Elements from: Granny Art, With A Russian/Dutch Heart, Osa Honey Designs, Pspgirl's Place

I also downloaded a this Dragonfly Dreams quick page from NumbBumm. It's so pretty and I loved Sue's suggestion of extracting an image of a baby and placing it on the lily pad so...

The quick page is pretty isn't it? That's my niece at 7 months I think... and yeah, that's a beer can she's holding. We were staying at a resort on vacation and we wanted to mess with my sister so we took this photo of her daughter when she went to the bathroom. Removing it from the photo for this layout was taking me too long so in the end, I let it stay there.

Anyway, I spent all of Saturday studying all the other features of Photoshop I have never used before. I've been using Photoshop since early 2000, I think... and this is the first time I have ever tried to use styles and effects. And I discovered that you can actually make a lot using the default presets that come with Photoshop. I was able to create digital "papers" or backgrounds using default Photoshop CS3 textures, brushes and shapes:

I was planning to include these as papers when I release my brass elements set but when I was putting it together... they don't match :( And my handmade paper texture paper (lower left image) still needs work. I thought it looked fine last night but looking at it this morning, I don't like it much. I hope to work on these more again this weekend. 

It's Monday morning and I wish you all a great week!