Explore, Dream, Discover - inspired by Scrap The Boys

Hello and welcome back to my blog! Hope you enjoyed our recent online crop event and found plenty of inspiration in the various challenges! Now it’s time for the February double page reveal on the Stick It Down blog!

This month we have two sponsors:

Cheeky Studio is a US company, whereas Thompson’s Craft Supplies is based here in the UK. Both of these online retailers have some fabulous crafting goodies in stock right now, so go and check them out!

This month we also collaborated with Scrap The Boys, and some of us at Stick It Down will be using their mood board to take inspiration from for our February layout.

I have to say, this theme was right up my alley! Having a boy who loves being out and about meant that I have plenty of photos to scrap! I decided to make this page a celebration of our time at National Trust, which is a British organisation for the preservation of historic places and natural beauty. We have been members for over seven years and I wanted to create a page which shows the passage of time, as well as some of the fun my son had at the different places, and how he has changed over the past years.

I found the sketch a bit intimidating initially, with all the geometric shapes - lots going on in the background, as well as lots of photos in the foreground... I had to choose my patterned papers very carefully...

I opted for the Creekside collection from One Canoe Two. I used the 6"x6" paper pad, rather than the 12"x12" sheets - the patterns are scaled down and easier to make sense of them on the smaller pieces of papers. I tried to alternate the busier and more muted papers, not to overwhelm the layout.

I stuck the paper squares onto two dark wood grain papers, creating some contrast. But the wood grain also coordinates with the browns on the small squares, so they work really well together.

I printed the photos with a white frame around them and matted them onto thick card stock, so they stand out from the background.

I cut the National Trust logo (an oak tree branch) from mirri card in three different sizes and used them as the base for the five embellishment clusters I created. The rest of the embellishments came from the Creekside sticker sheets and ephemera packs I had in my stash.

As the photos are slightly smaller than on the sketch, they were too paced out on the layout. I decided to add an extra spot for the journaling, since I had the room for it.

I didn't have any suitable letter stickers for the title, as I wanted it to be quite large, so I ended up cutting it out from royal blue glitter card. This might seem like a random choice, but it certainly stands out! It also coordinates in a way, because some of the photos as well as the paper squares and embellishments have blue details...

And that was that, really. Hope you like my layout and find plenty of inspiration from the Stick It Down blog this month. Be sure to check out what the other design team members have created, and don't forget to check out my process video on YouTube! Thanks for visiting!