Wow! I am blown away by all the wonderful comments yet again! I really enjoyed sharing my work with you all, and the response makes it that much better! Today I am going to take you through my scrapbooking process step by step. Things don't always work the way I will show, but in a majority of cases this is how I pull my pages together. Usually I start with a story idea and the photos to suit. But in this case the page was inspired by product.
As soon as I saw this cherry paper by Cosmo Cricket I knew I'd use it to do a page above my love of cherries. Just the week before I'd been practising some close up shots with a bowl of cherries, so I already had the perfect photos.
Then I chose some coordinating papers, also by Cosmo Cricket
and Thickers (of course) for the title. Because I had already decided what the title would be, I knew I would need at least eight 'e's, so I decided to use three different alphabet sets since I didn't have more than one package of the same kind.
Then I went to my Doo-Dad and Journaling baskets and selected a journaling note and embellishments.
(I'll talk more about these baskets on Friday) When selecting these kind of items I tend to take a few that I think will work, knowing that I probably won't use them all.
Now to get started. I'm really into photos with white borders lately so I crop them that way. I don't measure, I just eyeball and use a metal ruler and craft knife to cut them out.
Of course I am using a kraft background. The first thing I do is arrange the photos on the kraft until I find a layout I like.
This is good but since I know I want my title to be down the left side of the page it won't work.
This will work, but it seems a little off
Ah, better! This way the eye flows across the page better, the small photo with lots of cherries felt too "heavy" to be on the bottom of the page.
Now to add patterned paper
Way too much red, so I want to add some complementary colours.
I also placed the journaling spot to see how things look. Also note there is a piece missing from the red patterned paper. I'm not too worried about that, I'll figure out a way to cover it up later.
At this point I remembered that I was working with double sided papers and decided to use the flip side of the cherry paper too.
I don't like how the different patterned paper edges look against each other, so decorative tape to the rescue!
By the way, notice that I haven't stuck anything down yet. I learned the hard way to wait until I was really satisfied with my page layout before using adhesive!
At this point I start figuring out where to put my title. Again I pretty much eyeball it, and hold a couple letters over the page to see. When I'm using a long title like this I tend to write it out to count the letters I will need,and in this case to help me decide which colour to use where. Here is my little scribbling.
Yes, I spelt cherries wrong, so in fact I need less 'e's than I thought. Luckily I caught that before it was too late.....
Ok, it's now time to stick everything down. At this point I realise I only need to use a 3" wide strip of the cherry paper. (Yay! More left for other pages!)
But oops, I don't have a long enough strip of the flip side! I do have some scraps though, and since I know the journaling spot is going there it's enough
About my journaling: I tend to do stream of consciousness journaling in that I don't really preplan what I am going to say. Since I generally know ahead of time what story I want to tell, I can usually write my journaling out directly onto the spot or page in one go. I almost always use handwritten journaling. It's faster and I'm lazy!
I add the photos and title
I decide at this point that I don't like the first "cherries" in blue, so I change that
That makes a bit of an "oops" here
Which I'll fix with an embellishment
I finish up the page by making a slight change to the title (moved the "the") and by adding two more cherry embellishments for balance.
And there you have it! It's somewhat random, but this is pretty much what happens when I sit to scrap. And in case you're wondering it took me around 3&1/2 hours to do this including taking the photos and stopping to nurse, play with and rock Kieran to sleep. If I were to do a page like this in one sitting it would most likely take me under an hour.
And now for a challenge
This is one of my favourite ways to challenge myself, and is sorta linked to the way I choose embellishments for my pages. I tend to be a pretty messy scrapper, and I don't always get to clean up (ahem, I mean I never do!), so sometimes when the urge to scrap hits me but I can't make sense of all my stuff, I simply grab 5 to 7 things from my desk, and challenge myself to make a quick page using at least three of them. Think you're up for it? Add your pages to the flickr group and I'll pick a few to highlight on Saturday here on the blog. The more organised among you can still play along by choosing items from your stash that you've been meaning to use but haven't yet. And bonus points if you use kraft!
Tomorrow is giveaway day and it's a great one (as always) so don't forget to check in for your chance to win! I'll be back Friday to talk about where I scrap and how I organise my stuff.
