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Today I thought I’d share 2 of my most recent AE Design Team projects 🙂

Thankful For This Day

This project was totally inspired by these awesome badge like circles from Ali’s Thankful For This Day digital set. Circles in general are fun to play with, but I especially loved how these badges have that horizontal line right across the middle. I had “white space grids” on the brain thanks to Marcy Penner’s “On The Grid” class over at Studio Calico and a really cool layout by April Foster. I made myself a little digital template playing with the circles, oriented in a grid down the left side of an 8.5 x 11 page. I filled some of them in with photos, and some I just left as a solid colour, acting as place holders for patterned paper. This is a rough draft of my template. I used some of the “Thankful for this day” sentiments from that same digital set as a little extra frame around a few of the photos. I printed this page out, pretty much the way you see it here on glossy photo paper and used a circle punch to cut out the photos. I dropped the opacity of the photo and circle layers way down before printing this page again on a sheet of white cardstock, that way I had a very faint pattern to follow for placing my punched photos and circles. In the original series of photos, Emily and I were wearing bright pink hoodies, and the colours of Studio Calico’s Cirque Scrapbook kit were a perfect match (even though I ended up going with black and white photos in the end). I used the same punch on a few co-ordinating sheets of patterned paper, and I decided to repeat that horizontal separation of the circles by mixing and matching two different patterns per circle.  I stitched the circles to my cardstock base right across the middles and lifted the edges for some added dimension. I also used some foam dots behind the photos to lift them off the page a bit. I decided that I liked the look of the entire badge rather than breaking it up at the top and bottom of the page, so I printed one out on matte photo paper and again used a circle punch so all the circles were the same size.I finished off this page by adding a few gold sequins and embellishments from Studio Calico’s Cirque Scrapbook Kit, and a cute little tag down at the bottom.

Explore

Man, we have had a LOT of snow in the last few weeks! Liam’s school is literally a 3 minute drive away, even in snowy weather…but for some reason, picking him up at the end of the day takes a minimum of 30-45 minutes. Most of the time, it’s because he just wants to go exploring in those gigantic snow piles that have been built up, lining the sidewalks. I totally remember that feeling of “mountain climbing” as a kid and can’t say that I blame him. Although these days, I’m far more interested in getting back in the car as quickly as possible. It’s so stinkin’ cold!! I snapped this picture with my phone and it’s easily a favourite. It’s just so him right now 🙂

I came across this image on Pinterest recently (https://www.pinterest.com/pin/152559506103700421) and thought those giant black letters from Studio Calico’s Cirque kit might look really cool broken up by blocks of journaling! That was my intention when I started this layout, but after playing around with the position of the letters, I decided that I wasn’t quite brave enough yet to chop them up. Maybe I’ll still try it on a different project…we’ll see. As I was piecing this layout together, I wanted something subtle for the base underneath the title. I decided on a neutral patterned paper from SC’s Cirque kit, cut on a diagonal for fun (it reminded me of the “mountain” shape). I thought it would be fun to repeat the diamond shape on the lower half of that page, and Ali’s Story Frames felt like just the right touch of playful and whimsical AND THERE WERE DIAMOND SHAPED ONES!!! How perfect was that! So I made an 8.5 x 11 page in PSE, added the diamond shaped story frames on top, decreased the opacity so it was just barely visible, printed it onto my cardstock base and used it as a template to stitch white-on-white diamonds to the lower half of the page. A few ink splatters and a tag later to finish up the left side.

I think tags are my go-to for embellies/journaling spots. Love them! I used a big one on top of the full page photo for the right side of this layout and wrote a little note about Liam’s “mountain climbing” habit.

We’re busy party planning for a little mister who’s turning 5 in just 6 more days!! As he says, it’s “a whole hand!!” 🙂

Thanks so much for stopping by today!

Pam