THE THOUGHT BEHIND THE PROCESS

I have been trying to play catchup with my 52 week challenge that i took on over at ScrapChat - I totally love it... I get to be creative and do my own thing .. the only thing I really have a restriction on is the theme that is listed each week. There are a lot of blogs, forums and websites that give us all themes to work with, it helps our creativity and inspires us... we are so lucky to have so much motivation in our day.

Today i am going to go through the process of how my layout ended up the way it did.... this layout was from the 52 Week challenge that I take part in as I mentioned above. The topic for this particular week was - 'what's a personality trait you admire or seek in others - why?... the mind boggles when you end up with things like this.......it either comes to you straight away or you are doomed and rack your brain for days.

I was really happy with my finished product, so here is the explanation :

Each of my layouts that I have been creating have been based on  6" x 9" cardstock. I start with a piece of basic cardstock that i truly do not like the color of and transform it into each of my layouts. 

The printed yellow background that you see in this layout was created from a digital kit and printed on standard A4 photocopy paper. I adhered the background using glue. After the paper was adhered the whole thing looked a little drab, but i felt it had a nice old world look to the paper and just needed a splash of color and a few layers.

Texture paste is my friend... and after adding a small amount to my paint pallet with a paint spatula I added a touch of paint to give it a similar color to what the printed paper was. Using my paint spatula I adhered the texture paste sporadically around the edges and made a small sweep of it across the center of the page. I then let this dry .... waiting for paint to dry is like artists torture - truly.

So keeping myself busy while the drying process was happening I thought up my journalling. I chose some 7gypsies paper which was cut and loaded into my printer to print the journalling on. I then selected some vintage lace ribbon, a few buttons, a 7 gypsies tag and more paper which i scalloped. Once the Texture paste had dried the layering of my journalling block was first, then the tag, the vintage lace and then the scalloped paper.

For added dimension I zig zag stitched the scallop paper onto my layout. I added the three buttons for a little more attention to the beautiful bird tag. I felt that the layout needed a little more to help balance out the open space that was on the right so i cut out some butterflies out of printed paper and adhered them to the layout. 

Finally to add more depth i gave the layout a border by adding some dark brown ink to the outer edges

enjoy your crafting week

tracey