Trip to Liverpool

Hello, and welcome back to my blog! I will be showing you the layout I have created with the September double page sketch:

And this is the completed layout:

I had a lot of photos to include, so I have created a flap at the bottom of the page and ‘hid’ some of the photos behind it. This is how the layout looks with the flap folded down:

The layout tells the story of a day out at the Merseyside, visiting New Ferry, Liverpool and New Brighton. I wanted the focus to be the beach photos taken at New Brighton, so I placed these at the front.

I really wanted to use beach themed patterned paper, but for a crafter scrapping on a shoe string, I had to make do with what I had in my stash. I ended up choosing two papers from an older Webster’s Pages line with bold diagonal stripes across the page. I thought this would give a nice contrast to the blue of the sea and sky on the photos. Also, as the layout is not a busy one, I thought that the white space of the sketch might as well be occupied by a busy and striking paper. In contrast, the paper I chose for the flaps is a lot planer on both sides, allowing the eyes to see and interpret the photos easily.

I used embellishments from various collections, some older and some newer, but most of them travel or beach themed. I’ve kept the embellishment clusters small and simple, as they are not the focus of the layout. I also left some room for journaling.

I decided to replace the triangles on the sketch with some sequins - geometrical shapes are not a particular favourite of mine. I have used the Out of This World sequin pack from SpiegelMom Scraps - they’re the perfect colour match for those beach photos and give a nice contrast to the dark stripes on the background.

The idea was to have quite a lot of them at the top and thin them out as they descended on the page. This is how mist looks over the sea in my imagination, so it made sense to place them on the layout like that.

I am quite a logical person and not very spontaneous. I struggle to place things down randomly, and find it easier to carefully plan and measure out things in the creative process. So to stick down a bunch of sequins, various colours and sizes, in a random fashion was a real challenge. I had to put my OCD tendencies to one side and go for it, hoping for the best. In the end, it was a lot of fun!

I hope you like my layout. You can look at the process video here.

You can also check out the Stick It Down blog for loads more inspiration from the other members of the design team. Thanks for visiting! And a great big thank you for SpiegelMom Scraps for being our sponsor this month!