Basic Grey – Urban Luxe
When Basic Grey announced that they would no longer be producing products for scrapbooking, it felt like losing an old friend. They’ve always pushed boundaries and been adventurous and often surprised me with some of their more strident and eclectic collections and the scrapbooking world has been all the happier as a result.
Well I suppose they might as well go out with a bang and for me, Urban Luxe was a fitting way to do just that. The mouth-watering blues, pink and violets with funky black and white geometrics and all those lovely indigo ikat designs in this collection are so vivid – I don’t think I’ll be forgetting them in a hurry.
I used to love the way they’d tease their new collections with collages made from the various paper designs pieced together, so I though I’d do a little tribute to them by combining a selection of papers into a geometric starburst design and came up with the following. The idea came to me when looking through the colouring books that are all the rage at the moment. It was fun to put together albeit a little tricky to cut precisely but hey – I think it was worth it.
I cut the title on my Cameo using the offset function to cut a navy border around the word , not dissimilar to the die-cuts in the ephemera pack but they didn’t have the word I wanted !The black twine running horizontally is supposed to echo the guitar strings in the photo and I couldn’t resist a smattering of the jewel-like sequins from the embellishment pack to finish off.
This next photo of my eldest son lying amongst some inflatable guitars that we gave out as party favours at his 14th birthday party was made for this collection. I would have mounted it on plain white but why stick with white when you can have screaming pinks, blues and purples ! The 6″ x 6″ pack is so useful for layering and had some gorgeous colours that picked up all the colours in this photo.
The ephemera pack comes with heaps of titles and images ideal for layering.
Now I don’t usually do pretty pretty flowery stuff but I couldn’t resist cutting out some of the peonies from one of the patterned papers in the collection pack and interspersing them with a few stamped images using those layered flower stamps that are all the rage at the moment. I kept it simple with a couple of word stickers from Simple Stories’ Carpe Diem range. They’ve very cleverly included 4 sheets each in both bright white and a lovely off white – not all whites are created equal !
I really wanted to do one quiet layout amongst all the loud colours so chose the simplest design of some watercolour washes against a white background which echoes some of the louder designs in the collection. Having said I don’t do flowery layouts , I’ve gone and completely contradicted myself by doing … another flowery layout !
Just a simple cluster of die cuts and stickers from the collection was all that was required and another of the Carpe Diem word phrase stickers.
One of the things I look for in a collection is versatility and it struck me how incredibly versatile Urban Luxe is. You can go from funky to faded or vibrant to vintage all with one pack – brilliant !
I adored this black and white checked paper and the lips were a perfect die-cut to add to the photo. The letters in the collection are cut from watercolour paper , but here I just doodled in some lines. There are 3 different fonts in the pack and numbers too.
I was certainly on a roll with this collection – the layouts kept coming and I still have a ton of papers and die-cuts left. This last one was just a quickie but I had to include my favourite paper from the entire range. I’d like a whole pad with just this sheet please! I didn’t want to compete with its beauty so I simply added some heat embossed white ink splodge stamped images and more die-cuts from the ephemera pack. Nothing more needed.
Not sure how I’m going to live without Basic Grey but at least I have these in my album now to look back on fondly.
I’d love to see how you’ve used this collection if you managed to snap it up .
Basic Grey – Urban Luxe – Set of 13 Papers
Basic Grey – Urban Luxe – Mixed Embellishments Pack
Simple Stories – Carpe Diem A5 Planner – Word Label Stickers
