All Square: A sketch
A warm hello to you all. It’s a pleasure to be back blogging again for Hey Little Magpie following the arrival of my third child, a little boy, in July.
My scrapping time is scarcer than it ever has been right now. Not only because of having the children around, but I find myself dabbling in several crafts and my evenings are split between scrapping, knitting, crochet, cross stitch, digital project life and so on! Having said that, I really do enjoy the time i get to spend sat at my desk playing with paper and creating layouts. Each month I will be bringing you a sketch, along with a couple of page examples to go with it using delicious products from the shop. I find that sketch based scrapping is my go-to method for building a page, as it gives me a kick out of the starting blocks. Sometimes you might find that my page resembles the sketch pretty closely. Other times it may be barely discernible and look nothing like the original. What is useful to me is that jumping off point, though the page may take a journey far away from where it began!
To start us off a sketch that is all about squares. Four squares in the centre of the page. Maybe they’re all photos? Maybe they’re paper? Maybe they’re built up of other elements? My first example uses 3 photos, and in place of the 4th I have added my title, journalling and some embellishment. These pictures of my daughter eating a lemon just had to go with that older Dear Lizzy lemon paper, there was no question! The photos tell the story pretty well, bless her face.
This page about bathtime uses four photos, but they are printed as one. I used my phone to create a square collage in a photo app, and simply printed on a 6×4 print (making sure I selected to fit the photo to the page) cutting off the excess 2″ of white border, leaving me with a 4×4″ print. I layered up lots of punched circles in a strip across the page, and added a few embellishents above and below the photos as per the sketch. My toddler loves to help out at bathtime and wash her baby brother, but she can be a bit over-enthusiastic! “Wee-um” is how she pronounces his name, William.
This third example is probably the biggest variation on the sketch. but you can still see it pretty clearly if you know what the starting point was. I moved the squares block down into the left corner, and used only 1 photo. The other blocks are made up of layered papers and die cuts. The printed hessian from Crate Paper adds lovely texture to the page, and the design was balanced with an asymmetrical strip across the top of the layout. The photo conjours up a lot of memories for me – a simple snap taken on my phone just before we went down to theatre and our little one was born earlier this year. The library card that said “date due” seemed ideal for the theme of the page! I love little details like that.
I used lots of My Minds Eye My Story products on these pages, along with bits and pieces from Dear Lizzy Documentary, Crate Paper Craft Market, and puffy letters from Freckled Fawn.
I’d love to see your take on the sketch, so please do share with us either on here, or facebook/instagram if you make a page. Otherwise, stash the sketch ready to go when you need a little inspiration of where to start one day.
