Layout of the Week - Bo Bunny's Love Bandit

I hope everyone is all prepared for Valentine's Day! I still have a few cards to make & projects to finish. I've been a very busy girl for the last week or so. I've finished quite a few projects. One for Delaney, this Valentine layout and one to submit for an Ella Publishing contest...if it wins, I'll share it with you when it's published and if not, it will make a fun Layout of the Week. I'll share the others with you soon.

I created this week's layout with my favorite Valentine collection of the season, Love Bandit by Bo Bunny. (Check out Bo Bunny's Blog for lot's more Valentine inspiration!)  I love the use of color on these papers. It's refreshing to get away from just red & pink papers for this holiday. Not that I don't love all the hearts & sparkle Valentine's brings, but too much of anything can be overkill. So this cute collection full of little racoons & bugs jumped out at me.

Once I chose the paper, I happened upon a sketch contest on Ella Publishing's blog. When I looked over the sketch, I thought it was the perfect layout for my papers & the photos of my kids. Since brown is one of my favorite colors, I love to use sepia tone photos. These photos are from Jake's 2nd Birthday a couple weeks ago. He's wearing his red Christmas "mun-in" (monkey) jammies and they certainly didn't complement the Love Bandit papers at all. So I printed them in sepia which looks great with the browns & other colors of these papers.

Lately it seems like I've been making a lot of single page layouts.  In the past, I was a total double page spread (DPS) girl.  My love of symmetry always led me to create two pages for each layout.  But I have started to find more value in one nice large photo for a single page layout, you know,  a picture is worth a 1,000 words & all.  But I love this Love Bandit paper collection so much, that I decided to add a right side page to my sketch for the Ella contest.  I chose the blue patterned paper, I like how it coordinates with the brown background of the left side without being exactly the same.  See what you think....

And here the two layouts are side by side, just like they'll look in my album...

I hope everyone enjoyed my Valentine layout!  And I hope you enjoy your long weekend...hopefully it is a long one for you like it is for us!

Happy Valentine's Day!

See you back here tomorrow for Ann's Virtual Girls' Night Out!  All you bloggers out there really should check out Ann's party!  We have a lot of fun every Friday night, meeting & greeting bloggers from all around the web and the world!  I wonder if Ann's theme will be Valentine's Day or the Olympics or a combo of the two.  Those of us on the West Coast are very excited that they Olympics are in our time zone this year, maybe we'll catch more of the action!

Tips

Use sepia tone photos to easily coordinate a layout with brown tones.

Use 7 Gypsies buckles to hold just one little knot of ribbon instead of on ribbon running all the way across your page.

Don't be afraid to use two different background papers on one DPS.  Do try for a solid or unobtrusive background if one side is a pattern.

Don't let your photos hide your pattern.  Get out that craft knife & use it to trim around part of your pattern.  Check out the right side layout.  I used the craft knife to cut around the portion of the tree that would have been hidden under my photo mat.  Then I stuck my photo mat under that portion of the tree, letting the tree pop out over my photo.

Don't let those extra dots that come in the packs of THICKERS go to waste, use them as mock brads!  I put them on my tags on the left side layout.

Supplies

Bo Bunny:  Love Bandit patterned papers, chocolate dot paper, stickers, ribbon

7 Gypsies:  Pink Buckle

American Crafts:  Green Glitter THICKERS-dots & bracket

Martha Stewart:  Punch Around the Page Punch

Happy 100th Post to Me!...and boy, did I have fun being creative this week!

As I came to the blog to write this post I realized that it's my 100 Post! YEAH me! (as London Tipton says...if you're forced to watch Disney Channel as much as I am, you'll know just what I'm talking about, if not...count yourself among the lucky ones!) Help me celebrate my 100th post by signing up to be a follower while you're here! I'm hoping to get to 200 followers by the end of the year, so tell all your scrapbooking friends, bloggers or not, to stop by JulieChats. I promise to bring you all the greatest new scrapbooking products & techniques. And of course, if you're looking for more inspiration, be sure to check out my "Get Your Creative On" section, for links to other creative blogs all around the world & the web!

You'll probably notice that I don't have a Layout of the Week this week! Well, it wasn't because I wasn't creative...I did create a Christmas layout, it is quite cute, if I do say so myself. But since I submitted it in Ella Publishing's December cover contest, I can't share it right now! Hopefully I'll be back to tell you that it's going to be on their cover...if not, I'll share it with you soon! I used LUXE's wood design paper for the background and Creative Imaginations' bright new Christmas paper, a couple types of American Crafts' THICKERS, 6 different mosaic tiles from Mark Richards, those cute little black letters that look like they came from my mom's Dymo Labeler, my large corner rounder and an 8 x 8 photo of the cutest boy in the world...you want to see it, don't you! Well, soon you will, one way or the other, did I say to wish me luck! Oh, and be sure to stop by Ella Publishing's blog and website to check out all their great scrapbooking ebooks available for download, they're only $5.99! I just downloaded two and can't wait to share all the great layouts I create with them!

But even though I can't inspire you with my Layout of the Week this week...don't fret! :) I was lucky enough to attend a fun creative workshop put on by EK Success and Petersen Arne this week here in Portland. The event was for scrapbook & craft stores and Twila, the owner of Whimzee's Scrapbook Studio, where I work, invited me! And boy did I have fun! We got to create some wonderful things with products that aren't available in stores yet and some that we just hadn't gotten a chance to try out! After getting our kids off to school & driving across town, we were a little late, but arrived just in time to create THE cutest canvas bags with Jolee's Jewels and the Hotfix tool. The bags, even without all the bling, are so cool. And I mean COOL, my 8 1/2 year old was so sad, as she grabbed the bag & started carrying it around, showing it off to her friend....I had to tell her, "You know, Delaney, that bag is Mommy's!" So when I say cool, I mean it, just check it out for yourself:



Cool...right??? :) Well, I wasn't really so mean, I did tell her that we'd have these pink bags designed by Carolyn Gavin and the other cool turquoise ones in the store soon and she can make her own. The crystals are kind of difficult to see on the first photo, so I did take a second close up photo. But really, the photos don't do the crystals justice! They certainly aren't your run of the mill rhinestones! So if you're looking for a way to put some bling in your life, don't miss the Jolee's Jewels Swarovski crystal collection and be sure to pick up EK's Hotfix tool too! We'll have them at Whizmee's soon, so if you're in the Portland area, stop by the store to see our cool bags!



I promise to share more of the cool projects I made next week! Just let me tell you, we were all VERY excited to find out we could take home the new Martha Stewart Around the Page Punches that we made one of our projects with! I'm ADDICTED to them now, I MUST have them all!

Layout of the Week - Children of the Corn

In honor of Halloween, I created this fun layout last week. Our first outing of the Fall was a trip to The Pumpkin Patch on Sauvie's Island, just outside of Portland. If you're in the area, you should definitely add it to your Fall list next year. They've got a great maze, farmer's market, lot's of food booths...elephant ears, corn on the cob, carmel apples, sausage, burgers, loaded baked potatoes...animal barn, gift shop, hayride to the pumpkin patch (or skip it if it's too muddy & pick one from the huge pile next to the market) and of course a HUGE maze. This year's maze was a tribute to the Portland Trail Blazers, check out the photo in my layout.

This layout was my first effort at designing to someone else's sketch. I have all sorts of sketches & sketch books in my inspiration pile, but this is the first one I've done right to the sketch...pretty much, anyway. I created it for a layout call from Ella Publications. It was a lot of fun to try a technique that I've recommended to so many people, but haven't tried myself. I'm near the end of a set of 6 beginning scrapbooking classes where I've designed the layout, then created a sketch and kit for the participants. We'll be starting the classes again in January if you're in the Portland area and in need of some scrapbooking support! They're at the Hillsboro Library and they're FREE! I'll post about them when we've got the dates firmed up.

I was excited to use the Eerie collection from Basic Grey. I'm a big fan of using all sorts of patterns together in my layouts and Basic Grey's collections are some of my favorites. This layout features black vinyl THICKERS from American Crafts, I was excited to be able to create this title from a set I've used for two other layouts. That just shows you that the packs of THICKERS really give you a great selection of letters. My journal box is a tag from 7 Gypsies, I filled in the blanks and then wadded it up and stretched it out again, inking the edges & creases. I inked the outside edge of the layout with black ink to bring everything together. I put my little spin :) on the sketch, by tilting my layout, trimming the edges & mounting it on one last patterned paper...sneaking in another pattern...YEAH! My favorite embellishments on this page are my trusty garden twine (seem to be using it a lot recently) and the little black spiders were in a pack in my Halloween decorations, so they practically "jumped" onto the page as I created it!

I hope you're inspired to design your next layout from a sketch! Check out these cool sites for some great sketches:

52 Sketches ... a new sketch every week

got sketch? ... they've got 92 sketches on their site right now!

Creating Keepsakes Magazine ... all sorts of FREE sketches to download and also lot's of other cool downloads, brushes for you digital scrappers, journal boxes & tons more!

Tips

Give the sketch technique a try. Maybe keep to the original sketch your first time, if you're nervous. Then let your creativity go wild! Rotate the sketch 90 degrees, flip it over for a mirror image on the facing page, set your design askew on another piece of paper (what I did on this one), use journal boxes, embellishments or patterned paper in place of some of the photos...the ideas go on & on!

Use a tag instead of a journal box on one of your layouts.

Check out your gardening supplies, use twine instead of ribbon on your next project.

Supply List

Basic Grey Eerie collection papers

American Crafts THICKERS - Daiquiri black vinyl letters

Thick Twine (not sure of manufacturer)

Mini GlueDots

7 Gypsies Tag

Small plastic spiders (not sure of manufacturer) - found them in my Halloween decorations