Thursday, December 11, 2014

Design Process of Four Layouts by Heather Binnie

Heather Binnie is walking us through her design process for each of her December Creative Kit layouts today!

(she also shares tips for preventing your cat from interfering with your work!)

--------------------

Hello everyone! It's my turn to share my tips and instructions for the pages that I created with the Creative Kit.

Blake's First Christmas:


I really liked the background and wanted to leave as much of it showing as possible. This is a very simple page and I didn't take any extra closeup photos.

I first tapped some gold and red ink on the background. I didn't spray it, I just pulled out the spray top and flicked the end of the tube.

I chose just one sheet of patterned paper and chose green to help accent my grandson in his green pajamas.

After the photo was matted onto the green pattern paper, I simply just added stickers, carefully making sure I was making a few visual triangles.

I have a triangle with the wooden snowflakes and with the red stickers.

Some of the stickers are on 3-D glue dots to help them stand out more.

I used a little red rick rack to ground the photo.

That's it. Easy Peasy.

Merry Christmas 2013:


I was determined to use this picture, darn it, with this kit. My only issue was that I had a purple background and not a stitch of purple in any of the papers.

That wasn't going to stop me, though.

First, I sanded the background to make it look worn.


sand, sand, sand...don't make any holes.

Sprinkle some Heidi Swapp gold lame ink on the paper. I also used white ink. 





Uh oh, it looks like the cat is on the prowl again. Don't let your cat mess up your project. If she steps in your liquid ink, she'll track it everywhere. Just blow on the cat. Yes, blow on her. She'll move along and your liquid ink will dry at the same time.

Then I added (my favorite) gesso and some purple paint. Ooops, I don't have a picture of the purple paint but it's a Tim Holtz distress paint.

I ripped up the background pattern paper that I wanted to use to highlight the actual photo. I inked it up and added it back in kind of the same order it was.

That red bow on top is made with a Tim Holtz die. It's really very cute and very handy. I made sure to use a visual triangle this time with the color red to move your eye down the page. I broke up the big solid chunk of purple with a garland sticker.

The washi tape was added at the bottom as part of the triangle.

The green holly and the tree in the bottom right are also a visual triangle.

Santa 2012:


Now that my children know the truth about Santa, I had to make a page on it.

In my house, Grandma is Santa. That is also my journaling that is written all around the circle.

"Santa is really Grandma"

My family comes over to my home every Christmas Eve and every Christmas Eve, my mother is late. My mother has never been late to anything in her life but my kids never picked up on that. Every year, she was scolded because Santa would come and leave and she would miss him EVERY STINKIN' YEAR.

"Grandma!! You missed Santa again! Where where you?"

"I forgot the olives", was her response every year.

Poor Grandma.

Once the kids figured it out, they no longer felt bad for Grandma.

Anyway, I wanted this page to be simple, too. One patterned paper strip down the center. A circle of green dotted pattern paper to highlight the photo. If you've read any of my posts in the past, you know I have just a plastic template for circles. I just trace it at the size I want and cut it out by hand. I'm tired of goofy machines. I don't have room on my desk for all these things, especially when the cat wants to visit.

I cut the doily in half and put each half behind the circle to accentuate the photo.

I added some stickers and called it a day.

Oh, and the journaling. Don't forgot the journaling.

We're ready!:


Everyone is ready for Santa but where the heck is he?

Standing on my fireplace, we have my son, my neighbor, my daughter, my grandson and my neighbor.

They're all waiting for Santa and they're getting impatient but I'm doing a good job of keeping them distracted by making them hold still for photos.


I don't know if you know this, but I'm kind of a texture girl. I like texture. I wanted to do something different for the background and since I'm in Vet Assistant School (did you know that?), we've been practicing folding towels for surgery.

My entire life, I have folded towels in thirds and this is wrong. You're supposed to fold them accordion style like my picture above. Of course, you don't need to make as many folds but I will say I was inspired by class for this technique.

After I folded it all up, I sanded the edges. You can't see them very well in my photograph, but there are little creases and white lines on the green background.

For the rest of the page, I just kind of put it together. The snowflake is on a punched piece of red pattern paper, the ribbon is tied and glued down and those nasty little puffy mint candy things are on 3-D glue dots. Does anyone even really like those candies?

That's it for this month everyone. Thank you for reading and please join and get a membership to this fabulous place. Pam really does an excellent job at putting these kits together and she is SO ORGANIZED! I love that about her. :)

Have a wonderful holiday season everyone.

--------------------

Here's the December Creative Kit:


For full descriptions of our kits, subscription information, and more, visit our website at MyCreativeScrapbook.com