Designer? Moi?

I’m so excited to announce that I have been asked by the fabulous Ashley Hamman to become a member of the Stick It Down design team on a more permanent basis! Yay!!! This is such a great opportunity for me and I am so grateful for your faith in me and your recognition of my work, Ashley!

And this is my layout for October, based on the double page sketch:

I did use quite a bit of artistic freedom, I hope that the original sketch is still recognisable though. Call me square, but I have never been a circle kind of girl. Cutting a photo into a circle feels alien to me; also I like to have a frame around my pictures. The bottom line is, the photos had to be square.

On the original sketch the background consists of three rectangles placed on top of each other, gradually reducing in size and lined up centrally. I’ve decided to replace the top rectangle with a large scenic photo. It was really scary cutting it in half right down the middle...

The largest rectangle of the background consists of two identical patterned papers from the Pink Paislee Summer Lights collection. This is one of my fave papers at the moment, and I was so tempted to gut it, but I didn’t, for the benefit of the process video. The randomness of the stripes allowed for the two papers to be lined up without much trouble.

I struggled a bit to find the right paper for the rectangle in the middle. I have been phasing out my cardstock stash and, bearing in mind that I needed two sheets of the same, I didn’t have any colour that would have complemented the layout. So in the end I used a Heidi Swapp Colorshine ink spray on white cardstock. I really like how it turned out - the fact that it’s not a uniform colour and texture counterbalances all the angles and straight lines on this layout.

I matted the large photo on a lilac cardstock which I had in my stash for ages - I’m so glad I kept it as not only is it an in-colour at the moment, I really like this shade of lilac. And it was a good match for the background paper, too.

After matting the small photos too, I considered it putting them around the large photo as suggested on the sketch. It wasn’t working for me at all. It was too confusing for the eye to understand what was going on. So instead I lined the small photos up on the two sides. The layout instantly made sense.

There was already a lot going on, so I didn’t want to over embellish the page. I added the dates and the little flags from Pretty Little Studio to the photos and placed the title centrally onto the large photo.

As a final touch, I added some heart shaped sequins from the new Paige Evans line, Turn the Page. Again, the randomness of the sequins took away from the strict geometrical evenness of the layout and gave it some movement and spontaneity...

And that was that. I managed to stop at the right time, which is always a bit of a challenge for me - I do have a tendency to over-embellish.

I hope you like my double page layout... you can check out the process video on my YouTube channel

And be sure to visit the Stick It Down blog to check out the other layouts the design team has created this month. Thanks for visiting my blog!