Simple & Easy

This layout was so simple & quick, it's nearly criminal. Gabby is one of my favorite subjects, and this is what I like to call, her "cueball" period. This poor kid had no hair for like a year!

To create this layout, I used an 8x10 black & white photo that I trimmed to 8x8. I simply mounted that on some black cardstock leaving about a quarter inch mat, in turn mounted that on a very muted patterned paper from the Silhouette Collection (and of course, there was a My Stickease™ tag & border sticker as well!).

Before mounting that on the more bold patterned paper, I used my cutting knife cut some flower flourishes from the center of the paper that would be covered by the photo itself. Waste not, want not! You can see that I used one of the flower flourishes in the upper right corner of the photo.

I lined up where I thought I should place the large photo (this time I chose just about dead center) & lightly made some tic marks on patterned paper with a pencil. Again, I grabbed the trusty cutting knife & this time used it to cut around some flowers that I laid on top of the photo.

After cutting out the flowers & flourishes I wanted to save, I used a border strip from the My Stickease™ Assortment about one third of the way down the page, see it?

Even though it looks like the strip goes all the way across, it's only a couple of inches on each end of the paper. I still have about nine inches left of that strip. Now, I can use that on cards, altered items, & other scrapbook pages!

Note: I did not completely liberate the overlaid flowers from the bottom-most patterened paper, I only cut where the matted photo was going to be.

The foam squares were used to adhere & pop the flowers off the page.

This layout took less than half an hour!

Perfect Day

This is a lovely collection from Close To My Heart called Perfect Day. I'm no product snob, so there are a couple of pieces on this layout of my daughter, Gabby, that aren't CTMH.

The tag is a sticker from the My Stickease™ Perfect Day Collection & the bookplate a piece of chipboard that is painted, inked, distressed & clear heat embossed to give it an awesome 3D effect. Here's a close-up:

I'm also a huge fan of taking something that was meant for one thing & using it out-of-the-box. I cut a square metal tag in half, creating a neat photo corner:

I used jumbo scalloped scissors from Provo Craft & some CTMH eyelets to create this photo corner. You also see some of my non-CTMH embellishments, like those adorable Heidi Swapp sparklies. Of course, Close to My Heart offers a clear equivalent, but I'm trying to use up some old supplies. Come on, we all have tons!

I love to add a lot of dimension in my layouts & accomplish this by using foam squares in places where a shadow will be cast. Love it!

I felt very inspired by the Perfect Day Collection, so I also created this double page spread.

My older daughter, who was only eight at the time took these photos of Gabby & me. There were several photo's that I really loved, but they weren't something that I would generally add to my scrapbook without a little tweaking.
While I liked these photo's, they weren't composed well, but in general the usable part of the photos were about the same size. Yay! I cut them all the same size (approximately 2"x3"), matted them, put them topsy-turvy down the left side of the left hand page, & added the photo corners from the My Stickease Assortment.

I just love how this title came like this. I didn't have to do anything to it!

Maybe you noticed that I really love the paint, ink, distress, heat emboss technique because I did it again here using the brackets from Dimensional Elements Fresh Shapes chipboard. Here you can see the shine that the embossing powder creates!

I love that you can stamp on the CTMH twill! I'm also a huge fan of knots in ribbons, as you can see... I created unity in both pages by carrying over the knotted ribbon.