Guest designer: Claire Murphy

This month we’re excited to welcome our first ever guest designer! Many of you will know Claire Murphy from her lovely creations over at UK Scrap Addicts. We love her enthusiasm for this wonderful hobby and were delighted when she agreed to guest design for us. Read on to see her pages…

When I was asked to Guest Design for HLM I couldn’t have said yes any quicker – especially after seeing that they had the Echo Park Paper Mermaid Dreams collection in stock.

Layout number 1:
I love mermaids but I often find some mermaid collections to be aimed at scrapbooking photos of children. But not this one. This was perfect to get those photos of me at the Aquarium scrapped and into my album.

Whenever I think of Mermaids I always imagine bubbles and so wanted to recreate this by punching from the 12×12″ paper some circles in 1,2 and 3 inch sizes. I wanted them to appear to be floating up my page and to give the bubbles some dimension I added foam behind some of them and added a white edge using a white gel pen around some of them to recreate that bubble look.

We often scrap photos in a square format and so I decided to use the 3 inch punch to cut my photos too to help them blend in with the bubbles.

I used the stamps to fill in some of the empty spaces around the bubbles and used some Tim Holtz distress oxides in Wilted violet and peacock feathers to match the colours in the layout.

I backed my white cardstock onto a gutted piece of 12×12 patterned paper but the edges still looked a little bare so added some repeat stamping all the way around the edges.

I finished it all off with some final flourishes using the chipboard pieces and stickers from the 12×12 sticker sheet.

Layout number 2:
My inspiration for this layout came from the 6×6″ pad from Mermaid Dreams. There was a sheet of patterned paper that had a whole load of patterned strips and that is where my layout started. I cut apart the strips and layered them on top of each other in a non uniform fashion in the bottom half of my page, ensuring I overlapped some on top and tucked some underneath.

I had some photos from a few years ago where myself, hubby and a friend were messing around in a hot tub and found these the perfect photos when I knew what I wanted my title to be. I used the Mermaid letters from the chipboard sheet to start and cut into the 12×12 cut apart sheet as I wanted the word “off duty” also.

I then added in some more chipboard pieces and stickers on the layered papers to create some interest and to give the layout some dimension as it was all fairly flat.

I matted my photos onto white cardstock and then again onto a piece of patterned paper from the 6×6 paper pad. I used some foam behind these photos to lift them off the page. I love the natural shadowing you achieve behind the photos when you use foam and really helps give more interest to the page.

I didn’t want to disturb the top of the layout too much but there was a fair bit of white space so found a chipboard piece that looked like a crown and found this to be the perfect addition to the top of my page.

I then finished the layout by matting it onto a gutted piece of 12×12 patterned paper. I cut in half the purple and white strip and added these to the left and right sides of my page which helps contain the layout and draws your eye inwards to the photos.

Finally I used the hollowed star stamp from the stamp set and using some black ink I added in these little flourishes of stars to the left and right of my patterned paper strips.

I hope you have found some inspiration in these layouts and thank you for reading all about my designs. Oh and thanks to HLM for having me as a guest designer.

Claire x

A huge thanks to Claire for her lovely Mermaid pages, we can’t wait for her second post later this month!