April guest designer!

Please welcome Susan!

 

I'm an architect (and Star Wars fan) from Flemington, NJ and married to an amazing, patient husband who encouraged me to share our dining room space with my art supplies in our small circa 1889 Victorian house. We are blessed with two wonderful boys and I love to document our family through scrapbooking, because it provides me a way of getting some satisfaction organizing our photos and memories while simultaneously creating some personal artwork.

My springboard inspiration for this challenge was the large photo. It's not often that I need to incorporate such an enlarged photo into my scrapbooks. The first image I thought of is a favorite of mine from 2019; a formal photo of my sister-in-law and her niece and nephews at her wedding. There was so many great moments to document from this much anticipated family event that I've had trouble motivating myself to jump into this project for over a year. So, this challenge was my excuse to get it started!

At first I put the circular patterned paper where the sketch shows the triangular pattern, thinking that was a geometrically similar. I knew I wanted to use horizontal stripes to subtly reference the old barn walls in the photos somewhere, and after trial and error I decided to reverse the locations of the circular and striped patterns, putting the bolder pattern in the center and focus on highlighting the title. I'm not a pocket scrapbooker, but I was gifted a small tile card set, that just happened to be a wedding theme. The patterned black and white graphics worked well with the Valentine's Day paper, so I'm looking forward to incorporating more of that set on future layouts for this project.

I don't own a Cricket, so most of my titles are handmade. I've used this technique creating a banner connected with braided bakers twine in the past. I didn't have any really large alphas to use that worked so decided I would use a different font for each word in the tile, varying sizes to capture the spirit of the sketch. I love incorporating metal, grommets, wood and fibers.

Finally, I used embellishments to highlight the soft teal blues and burgundy in the papers. I've been experimenting more and more with pastes and gels on my layouts lately, and took this opportunity to use a new stencil to ground the photos more. I really like the stencil's bold graphic and how it compliments the circular paper pattern.

To read more about Susan's page, visit her BLOG.