I know when summer hits my neck of the woods, I don't necessarily WANT to be inside scrapping. I got a mean sunburn today just to prove that fact. I was out shopping for more additions to my perennial and vegetable gardens and might have gotten carried away at the nursery.
However, I simply can't ignore my scrapping for the three months of summer, so I this summer I'm trying to stop thinking so hard to create new and inventive designs. Instead I'm pledging to go really easy and get a lot of bang for my scrappy buck by using my own layouts from the past as jumping off points for inspiration. And not just any layouts, the ones that only took me one hour or less to complete. Now some of you would consider that far too much time to spend on a layout, but I like to move things around and tend to spend 3-4 hours on a page. Today's post will have three suggestions for speeding up your summer scrapping.
I'm also going to give you some sketches of these layouts so you can take them and use at will. Turn them upside down, sideways, or make them fit a different size layout. Whatever you need to do to speed up the process but keep you in the scrapping way this summer.
1. SKIP THE JOURNALING
I do not say this lightly. I am huge on journaling, but sometimes it's the part that really slows me down I want to say the right thing. But this page was fast for one reason. The journaling was already done for me. It's my daughter's Facebook bio, I simply copied and pasted it into a word document and printed on my wide format printer. Another thing that helped speed this one up was the embossed cardstock. I didn't have to go hunting for paper to match her photo (the current on she had on Facebook when this was created), I just grabbed some red paint that sort of matched her shirt, painted along the edge of one of free generic credit cards that used to come in the mail, and pulled the card down a part of the page. The embossed circles gave me the texture I wanted and the paint dried so quickly, I had the page done in under an hour. So skip the journaling, let someone else do it for you.
2. USE A LARGE PHOTO
The layout about my momma when she was a little thing took me LESS than an hour. I was rather impressed with myself, then I realized that with a large photo, I had filled up over half the space already. Try enlarging your great photos this summer, it will speed up the process. The most labor intensive part of this design was adding the bakers' twine.
3. USE SCRAPS THAT YOU HAVE LAYING AROUND
My final example honestly came together in 20 minutes because I grabbed whatever was in my recycle pile and just started to arrange it around the photo. Building around a photo with scraps is a fabulous way to both scrap quickly and use your stash. The scraps came from a kit I'd been working with prior to this creation, so everything already coordinated well. I simply added some stamps, rubons, stickers, machine stitching, and journaling and I was done. Try limiting yourself to what's on hand, it may speed up your process more than you realize.
And as promised are the sketches I made based on the above layouts. Print them off and use them how you'd like. Hopefully they'll help you speed up your summer scrapping so you'll have plenty of time for applying sunscreen BEFORE you head out to garden. :)
