I am back! As everyone knows, life gets busy, and scrapbooking has taken a back seat in the last year for me, but I was able to get back at it for a bit with a little help from a friend. We set aside a day to just chill and make some pages and it was GREAT! One thing I love about scrapbooking is you can walk away for an extended time… deal with all the happenings in life and pick up where you left off! You can relive the memories from the pictures and get your fingertips back to being dirty from the inks!

With this post I am going to step back a little and start from the picture selection …
I want to do a one page layout, highlighting Family Day for my son’s book, so I do not need seven pictures. I lay them all out, take a look at each one and try to select the pics that are in best focus or show the best reflection of the mood/feeling of the event, in order to capture the moment on a one page layout.

I choose the close up 5×7 cause its just darn cute, the picture of my son and I because it was just our day, and a picture of him near the river where we went exploring – these three capture all the special moments we had on that family day at Elbow Falls.

Now paper … I usually pick a few sheets that speak to me while flipping through the paper pads or stacks and throw my pictures on them to see what looks and feels the best.

Once I have selected the paper I think works best, I start playing with my picture placement, and then start in with my background details. Using a stencil and some ink, I exaggerated the rough pattern by adding more ink blots and some rough half circles in such a manner that I was able to skip a matting paper but still had some dimension. Using a few cutting circles and a pen I was able to rough in some circles in the background as well, just for, well, honestly, the heck of it!

Moving on to the fun part; as I started playing with embellishments, I basically went through all of my baskets of embellishments and picked out ones I liked and started placing them on my LO to see how much I needed and where. In the end, I thought the layout needed a bit more colour and complementing patters so I choose a few scraps to create pennants, which allowed me to keep the boyish feel and sneak in some fun colours and patterns. Adding a little ink on the edges of the pennants blended patterns into patterns, really complimenting the overall look and feel.

I used one of the critters from the Bo Bunny Camp-A-Lot collection just to keep it fun. Having him peek-a-boo from behind a cog keeps a juvenile feel to the layout which works well in the overall theme of G’s year 4 to 5 book! Rustic and cute is my favourite combo!

Once you have your LO placed, glued down and almost done, this is a great time to add in the little extra details, some tearing and peek a boo Pattern spots, plus roughing up and inking the edges of your background Paper = FUN!

When working with titles, playing with letter stickers and “stitching them” to the background can create detailing that sinks them into the background and avoids that floating in the middle of nowhere “WHY DOESN’T THAT LOOK RIGHT” frustration we’ve all gotten in the past.

And here is the finished LO!

Thanks for stopping in!

~ Shar

Scrapbooker + Story teller + Historian. Are you a Scrapstorian?