THE THOUGHT BEHIND THE PROCESS

I hope you have all had a fantastic Mothers' Day weekend. Spending time with family is one of the most rewarding things that we do - it shows the love and thought and caring we all have for our family and one another. 

My layout today is a page from my 52 week Journal for 2010 that I am creating over on the ScrapChat website.

This one is titled Family and I think it is very fitting for this week as we all discuss what a fabulous time we have had over the past weekend.

Sometimes I truly ask myself what I was thinking when i put together a page. This one is no exception - I love how it has turned out, and I did not plan any of it - it just evolved.

I started with my blank cardstock and had my photo picked out. Because the photograph is black and white it gave me so many options to choose the colors to compliment it, so I picked some of my favourite color combinations - red, aqua, lime.  With all these pages that I have been creating I really love the texture that I have added, the dimension cannot be duplicated even if i did this again, so my project is totally original each time. 

Firstly I had some tissue paper on my desk so I decided to coat my cardstock in glue and then added the tissue paper - folding and crinkling as i stuck it down. Yes it looked messy and unorthodox but then i found some fabric... and not any fabric -- it was heavily textured and worked well on the red tissue paper - on it went.

I then decided it was time to add the picture before i took to the layout with my sewing machine. When I approached the sewing machine it was laden with some very lush lime green rayon cotton... what a perfect color to introduce into this artwork I thought to myself. Because my layout was about family I thought it was fitting that i framed us all in a big heart - so many layers of stitching later i had created my border.

After the stitching I added some red mesh. I printed out my journalling and added lime watercolors to it as well as the tag on the left top of the page. The journalling was then sewn onto the layout and the tag was stapled on. I felt that the tag lacked something so i added some more red by introducing the heart and a making memories metal embellishment.

The title was added in a making memories label holder and a we are memory keepers lime swirl deco eyelet was added. At this stage it still needed more .... i was wracking my brain.... I felt I needed to introduce black because of the colors in the photograph so a black flourish rub on was added to the right bottom. The layout still needed a little more - so I added some lime green beads with dimensional magic. These i added a little over the flourish and up the stitching to help tie in the photograph with the journalling.

So that is my takedown of this layout. I hope you like it and I truly hope that you can have the courage to just have a go - set yourself no rules, have no boundaries, and create with what is in front of you and go with the flow.

Enjoy your week creating

tracey