Amanda Jones Designs – Studio Challenges Blog

One afternoon on a hunt for scrapbook layout or sketch challenges, I had the pleasure of discovering the Amanda Jones Designs – Studio Challenges Blog. What a great blog! The challenges are so much fun and the design team’s take on the challenges are so varied and inspiring. I am addicted to this blog!
On December 8th, Amanda posted a challenge called Stars. It’s her favourite shape and lately this shape has been a real go-to for me – never met her, but we kind of bonded!  😉  I was intrigued by the title of the blog, the design team’s take on the challenge and the overall freedom of the challenge – just use stars! No problem! So here we go …
Here is how I started: I knew I wanted to use these great pictures of my fiancé Lance with my little brother Hunter having an awesome “Where’s Waldo” search one summer afternoon, that I wanted to make it really boyish and outdoorsy and kind of organized messy. The look was inspired by the design team on the blog, absolutely. (Blog challenge on my iPad, scraps of outdoorsy colours, pictures and of course the stars – the very cool Close to My Heart Dimensional Elements Stars.)

To capture the idea of reading and books, I used the Creative Memories Border Punch System and the coordinating Notebook punch (I love this system and punch, love, love, love.) and to embrace that outdoorsy and boyish look I used my favourite Jumbo Java VersaMagic chalk. This colour and chalk is amazing, ask any scrapbooker in my family!

Starting with a base of 12×12 cardstock from Fancy Pants called Hammock (hammock pictures and hammock paper – a sign from the scrapbook goddesses). I grabbed all of my boyish Bo Bunny scraps and started layering, chalking the edges of each piece, and using the notebook punch on random pieces. I just move the scraps and pictures at different angles until it makes me happy. Then I selected a bunch of stars from CTMH, chalked them up to match and dropped those on too.
I still need some pop though, so when in doubt, cut a circle and find a home for it; in this case it was over the main picture to highlight it as the whole focus of the layout. Then some bright coloured Basic Grey stickers to give a little contrast, laid out in a triangle to again draw attention to the main photo.

Thanks Amanda Jones Designs for the inspiration – l love how this turned out!
PS – for those of you who love freebies and scrapbooking … check out her other blog, Amanda Robinson Studio Blog (the married name of Amanda Jones) for a weekly free cutting file.