Cats and Dogs by Alex

Hello lovely Flair Enthusiasts!

Alex here and today's post requires somewhat of a backstory and while it's not part of my "Inspiration Series", it could be looked at as a sort of extension to Part 3 which is about scraplifting.  I think I may have even hinted back then that I had this particular layout in it's beginning stages.  I didn't want it to be the part on scraplifting, since it was a much less true example to the original project.

It turned out to be entirely co-incidental that I'm using both the Cat Flair and much of the same paper (a lot from Shimelle's Box of Crayons which features plenty of cat and dog motifs of which I used 0! 🤷)

Now for the backstory... in May, my buddy Sara Scraps was a guest designer for Virginia Walker in her Facebook group Confessions of a Paper Addict (known as COAPA).  Virginia released a series of animal cut files including a dachshund for Sara.  I got so excited when I saw there was a matching cat so I suggested I should scraplift her layout since I have similar photos with virtually identical expressions!  You can watch Sara's YouTube Process Video here.

Sweet Puppy Days

By Sara Scraps

As I was preparing to do so, I had another idea!  With Sara's permission I used a photo of her dog and my cat and BOTH cut files.  This meant fairly major changes to the original since I had to squeeze in TWO cut files and figure out how much to keep the same and which modifications to make to ensure the layout was in my style.

The first step was figuring out the size and cutting the critters and loosely planning how they will sit on the page.  Painstaking backing of cut files with paper comes next!



















Sara's style is quite different to mine and I admire it a lot so I wanted to do it justice, but keep the balance in maintaining the things I love.  Sara used paper cut into strips and punched with border punches.  It was the perfect place to start since my punches don't get as much love as they should!

I used two types of punch as well as some branding strips and narrow strips.  I wanted to make sure I included enough black to co-ordinate with the flair and it could get tricky since I was using a fair bit of navy.

It seems as though I always stitch on my layouts, but I don't I promise!  I just felt these borders and strips were begging for it and I could lift up any loose edges for texture.

The background is an older Studio Calico crosshatch (as opposed to a plain white sheet of cardstock), and while I used multiple photo mats and more borders than Sara had in her original, I split the title into two areas like she did using two fonts as well.  This is definitely different for me (I rarely have the title split like this, nor do I have the construction of the two cut files and photos separated, but it was the only way to squeeze them onto the page).

While I was on the punch kick. I punched some pinked circles under the flair to help them stand out and putting them om either side of the title helps with that and to make it a bit more obvious that it's a single phrase.

Due to the pattern of the pink paper at the top of the page, the embellishment cluster where Sara put hers would have to come down.  And get a whole lot bigger obviously, because this Crafty Mama is all about All.The.Things! 🤣

The corresponding area diagonally across from the embellishment would be the natural spot to put the journaling.  The journaling and story is always critical for me and especially in this case when it may seem a little weird to scrapbook her dog and my cat regardless of our friendship! The story is less about the animals themselves, but more about our similarities and in this particular case only a fellow Fitzwilliam fanatic and Austen aficionado would co-incidentally name her dog the same thing I named my cat! 🙌🙌🙌

Before finishing off with some puffy hearts, I added tiny tabs with the dates of the photos since they weren't taken at the same time.  In such a case as this, I'd most likely store the layout in the same month of the later photo.

A Tale of Two Fitzes

So you can see how I started with Sara's idea, yet made it look really quite different but simply starting with two cut files.  Even without the other changes, it's a pretty big shake up.

Embellish With Flair Products Used:

Cats

Dogs

Thanks for stopping by and as always, 

Love and Embellish With Flair!

xx Alex

Finding Inspiration Part 2 by Alex

Hello Lovely Flair Enthusiasts!

Alex here with the next installment of my Lost Mojo (or Finding Inspiration) series!  If you missed part 1 you can find it here.

Today we're talking colour.  I absolutely love colour and don't shy away from throwing lots and lots of it on my layouts!  So how can we use colour to get us out of a creative rut?

Are you a crafter who needs to start with a basic staple like white cardstock each time or do you prefer colour and or pattern? 

You can still be inspired by colour even if you are, for example, a white-sheet-of-cardstock-as-a-base scrapbooker.  You just need to keep this in mind while you pick out your other supplies in your chosen colour scheme

There are plenty of colour palettes all over the internet like Pinterest (we’ll touch on Pinterest a bit later) where someone else has come up with a selection of colours (usually to go along with an inspirational image.

You may wish to take colours from your photo, but you don’t have to.  It may seem like a strange idea, but it can work really well especially when the colours in your photo don’t relate to the story as it happened in your head or reflect how the event really was.  (Today’s layout is one of these!).  For example, a photo taken on an overcast wedding day (especially of its of guests rather than the bride and groom) wouldn’t be true to the story if created with similar colours!

So where to begin if you want to use colour to get your mojo going again?  Are there any specific colours that relate to your story or memory?  Today’s layout is one of many layouts of my son’s year 6 graduation.  I use his school colours throughout his “school” album: purple, aqua/turquoise and black.  I also use a fair bit of grey since it's one of my favourite neutrals and the boys’ school uniform has a lot of grey.  This doesn’t mean each page in that album uses those colours and only those colours.  Usually it incorporates one or more colours mixed with others to make new combinations while still giving a sense of continuity.

Doing a Google search for color scheme or colour palette (followed by the name of at least one colour) can give you sites like Magnet Street or Design Seeds for example. With colour palettes created by other people,  I prefer to search Pinterest and make boards for various albums where I have recurring colours. 

There are also sites like Coolors where there are random colour schemes constantly generated,  you can enter a colour to filter the colour schemes in the database,  adjust shades and hues,  pick colour schemes based on a photo and so much more!

I find that searching Google or Pinterest for one colour at a time gives better result than entering the whole string, but definitely try both and in between options.

So…for today’s example I did just that, but not at the very start of my process.  Firstly I got an idea when I saw these Embellish With Flair purple star badges.  I use stars as a motif in the school album, but even more so in the graduation photos.  For some reason I thought of cut files with a star in place of a letter like this super star cut file by Paige Evans.  I don’t use cut files on all my layouts, but it fit beautifully in one of his graduation layouts.  Especially when the star is turned into a shaker!! 

I decided to look through some of Paige's collections as a starting point.
📍Tip when you get stuck: if you’ve made one decision, stay with the same manufacturer or designer as a starting point.

I got really excited when I saw paper 11 from Turn the Page collection.  Then I saw paper 19 and decided I was found to fussy cut both papers.  The back of this paper co-ordinated beautifully and I toyed with using it as a background, but I wanted my cut file and stars to stand out and the stripes might compete too much with everything else, but I hadn’t ruled it out.

In any case, the fussy cut stars in the “wrong” colours could be turned around and used anyway!  I did want more than just the aquas, greyish blues and greens.  I hoped to add purple and possibly something else.

I searched Pinterest for the terms colour palette and colour scheme with each of the colours and saved anything that grabbed my attention.  I really wanted to see how purple would look with these colours in an actual example to confirm how it linked up in my head.  Lots of times I imagine something and it simply doesn’t translate to paper the way I thought.

Most of the search results that come up on Pinterest are from Design Seeds.  You can visit their website directly and what I love most is that there is an image along with the colours they chose, so you can use the image and add more options for yourself.

 What I love about Pinterest is that you can make a board (even a secret one if you don’t anyone else to see it) and save what grabs your attention.  Like this cat.

It more or less had the colours I was after.  Another one of Paige’s collections has a very pale purple, but I wanted something a bit bolder so I kept looking and found these other palettes.

I figured that between the three I was set.  I was a bit disappointed not to find a new colour, but when I thought about all the shades of the ones I had, I probably had enough.  The exact greens in some of the palettes are way off, but it gives the general idea.  A more muted green needs a more muted purple, but in the case of this…the lime green goes really well with the bright purple.

So back to my layout.  I use a nested star cut file of Paige’s and cut different sized starts on the silhouette out of mostly purples, but a few more greens and aquas to.  I tried to pick papers where I could use both sides.

I cut my title and printed my photos then took a punch or two to the scraps to get some tiny and medium stars.


Shaker Pocket and backing the cut file - done!

Stitching some of the stars together for texture and interest - done

 

Once everything was in position, I used a ruler to mark out the area for the starburst and stuck down the stars.

I used the flair badges to make the centres of the letters such as R and P since they didn’t have them and the stars on the flair badges co-ordinated with the shaker pocket star A.  It's a lot of flair in a concentrated area, but they definitely stand out!

As much as I love piling on the embellishment, this page didn’t need a whole lot.  I used a little bit (for me), but even so, the whole page is practically covered which is NOT what I had in mind!  The title isn't the best choice for the specifics of the story.  On the surface it's about that bear, but on a deeper level it's about our relationship and I always think of him as my buddy and my superstar so while other stories of the night might have been better suited to this title, it's certainly not totally out of place.

Mama's Super Star

Embellish With Flair Product used: 3 Tone Stars Purples

That's all from me for this installment.  I hope it made sense.  Colour is such a vast topic!  If you have any questions, comment below! 

Love and Embellish With Flair,

-Alex xx

Finding Inspiration Part 1 by Alex

Hello lovely Flair Enthusiasts!

Alex here with the very first Design Team project and blog post.  I love that the four of us have different strengths and passions and we all bring something different to the table.

Today I thought I’d talk a bit about inspiration or “mojo” (in particular lack of it!) as it’s known around the crafty community.  We’ve all heard about it and probably all experienced it…but how do we get past it if we want to make something?

Inspiration for a project can start anywhere no matter what you’re making.  It also can come from several areas at once.  Understanding the possible sources and what is likely to work for YOU will hopefully help you get out of a rut and get you making again. 

I may have to break this topic up over more than one blog post so it’s not ridiculously long - and I’m not likely to be able to give you a single project that covers aaaaaall the examples!

Story or Photo

I’m starting here since I’m mostly a scrapbooker (and mostly for the story telling aspect), but I’m sure you can take something away from this even if you don’t scrapbook.

For scrapbookers, it’s often a story or a photograph which starts their creative process.  The photo and story might be the same, but not always.  If not, it adds an extra step when getting ready to scrap.  I actually love it when my photo doesn’t directly correspond to the story and only by reading the story does it all comes together and you make the connection!

Product

Sometimes it’s a product that starts the creative process.  Is it a sheet of patterned paper with a motif that makes you immediately associate it with a photo or story?  Something brand new that gets you excited and your pulse racing, or an old favourite you forgot you had and only stumbled across by accident it as you tidied up in your craft room?

I can tell you that my product choices almost always tie in with the story very closely and I’ll tell you about all the important bits as I go along in this particular example.

Let's Get Scrappy

So what inspired today’s layout?  If I had to break down the MAIN source, it would be story and photo, but for me, product played a part too.  I don’t mean the flair badges themselves, but the specific ones I decided to use.  This ended up touching on colour a little bit too.

As I thought about what kind of project to make, I naturally considered what story I wanted to tell.  Finding a photo to work with it is often a simpler issue (for me) when I already have a story in mind.

Naturally it needed to be compatible with those lovely flairs.  Since I had such a varied selection to work with, I wasn’t overly concerned about finding some to showcase.

Fairly often, I get hit with an idea like a bolt out of the blue and this is what happened this time too.  I can’t tell you how exactly it occurred to me to make a layout using the photo of the whole design team (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen them in my Instagram travels occasionally) but the timing seemed to make sense just as the first DT begins its first term, no?

The aqua and blue feathers of the Embellish With Flair logo were a natural starting point.  I remembered I had a light blue paper with a feather print from Shimelle’s Little by Little Collection!  Perfect!  I had a photo, the beginning of a story and a paper I was pretty sure I’d use as the background.

Now that I had a few decisions made, was a good time to go through my flair badges and pick something that works.  I knew straight away these Mirror Ball flair badges were the winners. These colours reminded me of Shimelle’s Head in the Clouds collection.  The playful and whimsical nature of that collection would work.  I could possibly even get away with a dragon or two!  They remind me of imagination and creativity.

Shimelle’s Box of Crayons and Glitter Girl, Paige Evans' Whimsical and crafting themed lines by Echo Park and Simple Stories also had some colours that might work and they all had crafting/inspirational motifs and phrases.  I don’t always go for themed products, but sometimes (especially when it’s about a topic near my heart) I just go for it.  For me personally it’s a bit of an all or nothing approach!

While we’re talking crafty motifs, Virginia Walker has been making some incredible cut files (especially ones which made great titles for craft layouts).  This was as good a time to use one as any and the one I chose seemed to make me think of starting something and the start of a design team working together for the first time connected the dots in my head.

Once I backed the cut file with patterned paper and added dimensional foam to the back, I just had to figure out where the photo, journaling and embellishment areas would go.  Then it was time to commit!  I did some messy stitching to give the paper strips some texture.  It's a simple but effective detail!

You'll find all kinds of little bits in my embellishment clusters,  There are almost always cameras since that's an integral part of scrapbooking, some whimsical critters and even peacock feathers as a nod to Crece's logo!  Speaking of her logo, I used one of the packaging inserts as a base for my embellishment here.

I also used the three chipboard circles from the Whimsical chipboard pack to hold the flair badges.  I didn't want them to get lost and these were the perfect size.  The little sentiments around the circumference are quite perfect and the colours are variations on pink, aqua and purple too. 

Phew!  Thanks for sticking with me after all that and I hope you found it useful.  I’ll be back with another project on 21st May with the next installment in this series.

Embellish With Flair products used: Mirror Ball

Love, and Embellish With Flair!

-Alex xx