Crafty Critter

I am a crafty critter. Not sure from wence it comes, as I don't think it was always there - at least not in the conventional formats. I mean, I was a KILLER tent-maker as a kid (with separte rooms and furniture) and I suppose that shows some amount of creativity, but the whole scrapbooking/painting walls/craftiness didn't show up until... well, I think until at least sometime after I got married. But here it is. It oozes from my pores. I use it mostly for scrapbooking, but I also LOVE painting designs on walls, making things to hang on walls, sewing, making cards, and creating gifts for those I love (or anyone who has a project and wants to pay me - tee hee).

I'm going to begin with some scrapbooking, mostly because I have some pictures already taken. :) I do a good bit of "scraplifting" from magazines, but I also find ideas in magazines and then modify them to fit my picture needs. The most frequent modification to be made is finding a place to put MORE pictures on the page. Sometimes I want to have just one amazing picture from some event, but usually I have TONS of pictures and don't want 10 pages for one event. I found a way to fit more pictures in without it being boring, "the usual", or "high school bulletin board collage"-y.

I create grids. I use papers that coordinate, a solid color background (usually black or white, but I vary it depending on the rest of the page), and embelishments. I cut my pictures and my accent papers into equally-sized squares to fit my page. (Somewhere between 3.25" and 3.5" for my 12x12 pages usually works best, but you do what works best for you.) I make my balance between pictures and papers as random as I can. (I tend to like things "perfectly random" which is basically not random at all, but made to look that way. I'm ridiculously anal about some things. haha.) I just piddle with them until they look "right" to my eye. Then on some of the paper squares, I add stickers, stamps, or journaling to accentuate the pictures.

Sometimes I have pictures that won't fit into a square and you'll see an example of how I work around that in one of the pictures below. :)

Also, sometimes I make the facing page a statement page with one great picture and a pretty layout, but if I have tons of pictures for that one event, I'll do two of the grid pages back to back.

It's a method that allows me to make all these pages a little unique, but still get more than 1 or 2 pictures on a page, which makes me happy.

Love & Shipoopies,

Leslie