April Sketch with Fancy Pants Attwell and Illustrated Faith She Blooms

 
 
 
 
This month I wanted to challenge myself to use a pocket page protector style on a 12×12 page. I chose a classic split design, featuring two 6×4″ spaces at the top, four 3×4″ spaces in the middle and two further 6×4″ spaces at the bottom of the page. This kind of design will probably be familiar to you as it’s offered by several companies as a page protector style, but how does it translate to a sketch? I used it three different ways below. For these pages I used a mixture of Fancy Pants Attwell and Illustrated Faith She Blooms collections.

 
 
 
 
The first page I made stuck closely to the original design – I used one (just less than) 6×4″ photo of my daughter on her christening day and placed it bottom right on the layout. Then I cut patterned paper to fill the other slots on the page, and a piece of white card stock for my title to sit on. I cut each one slightly smaller than the dimensions given, so as to leave a bit of the white background showing. The title block and photo are lifted on foam pads so that they literally jump off the page at you first when you view it.

 
The bonus of using this design on a 12×12 layout is that you aren’t confined by the pockets. I like to have embellishments overlapping my photos and it feels more comfortable to me to “join” the elements of the page by doing this. I kept my elbellishment pretty simple, but made sure that every ‘pocket’ area had at least something small touching it, so that nothing was floating alone on the page.

I used a white chipboard word for my title from Bella Blvd chipboard basics. I love using tone on tone every so often, and a page like this needed a subtle and classic looking title. Flamingoes are a bit of a thing in our house too, so I’m pleased they’ve been in vogue for a while, meaning I have collected lots to use on future pages too. I might have also collected a few to put on my wall too!

For my second layout I shrunk down the page design and overlapped the patterned paper blocks, using them as a base for my photo and title. I used plain kraft card stock for my background and splattered gold mist in a diagonal line to carry the eye across the page. I’m so pleased with how different this page looks to the first just by shrinking the design and placing the photo on top rather than  one of the blocks.

This photo was one of the first taken of my husband and our new baby son last year, and I adore it. The gold phrase sticker from Crate Paper Little You described the sentiment of the picture perfectly for me, so it didn’t require much other journaling aside from the important details like names and the date. The yellow and green tones in the Attwell and She Blooms collections blend really nicely together – it’s great when what you see in an online shop is such a good match for the real thing, as sometimes it can be hard to assess whether things from different collections will go together well or not.

The puffy stickers from Fancy Pants add a lovely bit of dimension and texture to the page – they’re very tactile. I also used some colour block wood veneer pieces from Pink Fresh Felicity which are just a gorgeous detail addition to all these pages. Definitely the kind of product where I will use the whole pack easily.

For my third take on the design I blended the top and bottom sections together, and used the middle section of the page for three photos and my title. These were photos from a couple of years ago, but it felt like a good time to scrap them as they’re seasonal again! What baby doesn’t look cute wearing Easter bunny ears?!

That striped design at the top is actually a printed transparency, which again adds a lovely variation in texture to the page. I added a few bits and pieces from the Crate Paper Hello love collection, and more of those lovely wood veneer pieces too. The aquas in both Attwell and She Blooms matches well to the photos, and the Spring/Easter feel of the page. I added some gold too, both in the title and in my three embellishment clusters. When I add small elements like the gold glitter hearts to a page I tend to add them to each area of embellishment – often forming a visual triangle around the focus of the page, This layout is a good example of that – 3 clusters surrounding the photos, each containing a journaling die cut, wood veneer, a puffy sticker, gold glitter, and a circle of green patterned paper.

 

Thanks as always for looking and reading here at Hey Little Magpie, see you again next month!