Tuesday, December 9, 2014

My House & My Room


    Hi again! This past weekend was filled with so much crafty goodness, but none of it involved papercrafts. I think I may have worn myself out with these pages, but Christmas cards need to be made so I'll be back into it this week while my few remaining Christmas crafts will fill in the gaps in the time remaining until Christmas. Luckily, I think I am ahead of schedule and will hopefully be able to share some of those gifts here soon too. There was paper involved in both projects, just not the finished result. That still counts, right?

    Anyway, on to pages 4 and 5, My House and My Room! There isn't much but the obvious on these pages. I did select colors for each page based on my niece's house and bedroom so that the photos would match. Plus, it gave me a good starting place for paper and embellishment selection. I also found a card that had 'Places I've Lived' written at the top to add since my niece has lived in a few places so far due to their house being built and finished around the time she was born. I also wanted to add some matting that could be used for small pictures like one of their porch swing, the mail box, the house number or the front door. Those pictures could also line the pavement stones die at the bottom of the page and the matted areas could be used for journaling. Just some ideas!
 

    These two pages also started the ever-obsessive doily presence throughout the book. I am still picking doily bits out of my carpet. I also found out that you can use Distress Paint in the metallic colors to make letter stickers look almost gilded. Just leave them to dry for a while on their own stuck to a craft sheet. They are so lovely! I also did myself a favor and went through my dies, mostly Tim Holtz, and cut out a plethora of ones I thought went with the book's style to use on future pages, which I will be adding to the blog soon! See you then!
Rachel

Thursday, December 4, 2014

My Story Begins


    Welcome back! I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and made some memories. I kept very busy with family and friends who were visiting for the weekend and decorating my house but now I have switched back to a more normal schedule of watching hockey, making Christmas crafts and blogging pictures of THE book! 
    Today, I have the first full 2 page 12 x 12 spread to share! 

  
   
    My idea for this page came from the idea that every person has a story and it starts even before they are born. It involves many people and those people's lives are forever changed because of that person. So, I included some matting for photos, but mostly journaling prompts like, About My Birthday, About My Name, and so on. I also included a card with the words 'Some Memories' to serve as a catch all for other things that the other prompts didn't cover. 
    I don't have much to include in this post regarding the papers that I used or the specific product lines I pulled the elements from because of my technique in making the book, so I'll share that instead. (If you do want to know where an element or item came from, just hit the comments and I'll try to go on a treasure hunt for you!) My idea in making the book was to make an entire cohesive unit that blended well and had similar tones and motifs. So, to make it easier on myself, I made a list of page titles and then went through my entire stash of papers and pulled together anything that 'belonged' in the style I wanted. Then, I yanked out sheets of paper that went with the topic of the page, like the typewriter paper I used here for the 'My Story' page and worked to find a mate for that page. I also pulled out sheets that had ephemera or lettering or journal cards that matched the overall motif and made stacks, and stacks...and stacks.  It kind of made a huge mess but with a few post-its it was manageable and having my entire stash whittled down to a theme and a subset made it so much easier to choose what would go on those chosen 12 x 12 pages! I'm very fond of collage and grouping a ton of items on a page to fill up the area and this works well with this style of scrapbooking since I wasn't working from pictures or specific stories. My goal was to make very cohesive, pretty, blank pages and was able to do that by just sifting through my stacks! There are lots of items and collections that are repeated throughout the book, but I think that just helps give it more of a special project feel. 
    In putting the pages together I stayed very consistent on the use of a few products, the first being Distress Ink. There were many papers that I pulled together for each page that had unmatching undertones (shudder) and using Antique Linen, Old Paper, Frayed Burlap, and many other inks gave the pages a similar undertone and made me happy! There is very little in the book that does not have Distress Ink on it somewhere. I also consistently used ribbon, twine, or some type of trim to each page. I also made sure to add some type of ephemera and small metal items to each page. For instance, on this page I used a metal word band and paper clip and some butterflies an the clock. Little touches like these are my favorite :) 
    Anyway, I hope you like these pages and some of the ideas I shared here. If you have any questions or just want to say HI, just send me a comment below. I'd love to hear from you.
Thanks!