Jennifer Larson again, sharing some of the ways I figure out how to add stitches to pages. But first, Happy Thanksgiving to all our American friends! We hope you have a day filled with family, love, and laughter. And good food, too! Don't forget to print out the gratitude cards for those gathered round your table today. It will make a quick and easy mini album for a Christmas present...
Getting back to stitches... How do you decide where to add details through stitching?
For me, I tend to focus on the three major parts of my pages:
- the title
- the journaling
- the focal photo
When I add stitches, I want to add them to important parts of the page, so I start by looking at one of these three parts. Here's some instances where I stitched to draw attention to the title:
On this page, I put a stitcker under the title; unfortunately, it wasn't long enough for the whole title. I added some cross stitches to finish out the line and add texture.
I did something similar on the next page:
This was a fairly simple page, so I wanted to add some pizzazz. Since the page was about the 4th of July, a star seemed in order; since I have star punches, I used one as a template to stitch around the title. Just enough pizzazz!'
On the next page I added stitching to both the title and the journaling:
I hand drew the word "photos," punched holes, then stitched the title. To draw attention to the journaling, I stitched around the numbers.
Here I used stitching to draw attention to the focal photo:
I mentioned earlier this week that I like to stitch photo corners; I did this here.
I also added some cross stitches to the title and some embellishment clusters. When I started scrapbooking, a design principle that was emphasized involved making sure that embellishments were "nailed down" with buttons or brads to the page. (This might have been a reaction to sticker sneeze.) Cross stitches do the same thing, but less obtrusively.
Because I cannot get enough of stitched photo corners:
This page use iPhone photos, which were only OK--in darkness, sort of yellow. I think the stitched photo corners draw them together and make them seem a bit more formal and special. Which of course all photos are, even if they lack technical polish.
Finally, getting back to cicles, which I can't get enough of...
I do this technique a LOT, probably because I am not a terrific photographer (heh). When I want to draw attention to the subject in my photo, I stitch a circle around it. Here I had taken a photo of my son playing soccer at night, and the photo was just too dark and muddy. I loved the colors, though, and I wanted to record the memory, so I used my Bazzill circle template to stitch around my dude in the red hat.
I've had such a fun week sharing my stitching habits with you. Tomorrow we will be bold and daring and talk about stitching outside the box: stitching free hand!
