Layouts based on sketches

The brunch bunch: DT layout for Stuck?! Sketches

July 1, 2015 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

Today Stuck?! Sketches is revealing its first sketch challenge of July, and the design team layouts for this one are awesome. Please join us over at the blog and allow the sketch and the design team inspire you to play along. We have great sponsor prizes up for grabs.

These photos show my friend, Audrey (wearing pink), with the group of friends she invited to attend the May Ladies for Life brunch held by the Coalition for Life. She hosted us all and decorated the table really beautifully. It was a great way to spend a Saturday morning—surrounded by sweet women and listening to an impassioned speaker on an important topic. For added fun there was also a photo booth with a pile of crazy hats and props, so we took a bunch of kooky photos together.

Product/technique notes

If I have items in my scrapbook stash that I still like and they go with my photos, I don’t care how old they are—I’m going to use them! I’m not ashamed to admit that the papers and stickers on this layout are from the BasicGrey Euphoria collection from 2008!

El Niño layout and card using leftover scraps

June 29, 2015 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 4 Comments

2015 is an El Niño year, and boy, have we felt its effects in Texas! We have seen far more rain than usual so far, but May and June have had epic rainfall numbers (and lots of flooding).

We took these post-thunderstorm photos down at Rattan Creek Park at the end of our street on June 14th. In other summers this creek has been just about nonexistent because we get so little rain here.

I’ve heard a lot of people grumbling about “too much rain,” but I really don’t understand that mentality. When you live through several years of extreme drought conditions, how can you “get sick” of rain? Believe me when I say that we are truly grateful for every raindrop.

I am participating in the Scrap Our Stash sketch challenge #27, which requires you to follow the sketch and then create a card out of the scraps from your layout project. Here is my card, which I will be sending to a college friend of mine:

Product/technique notes

LAYOUT: Following is the Scrap Our Stash sketch #27. I used patterns from the BasicGrey Kelly Purkey Mon Ami 6×6 paper pad, cut the clouds with my Silhouette and hand-stitched the circle.
CARD: The stamps are Hero Arts, and I hand-stitched the edges.

Life moves pretty fast: Celebrating Ferris Bueller’s day off

June 18, 2015 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 6 Comments

“Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” came out in June 1986. However, a die hard baseball fan/blogger has done research on the Cubs game Bueller and his pals attended in the movie and determined that it was played against the Braves on June 5, 1985. That means this June 5th was the 30th anniversary of Bueller’s fictional yet famous day off!

Alas, Matt and I couldn’t take off the whole work day. But we did knock off early on that Friday afternoon to go out for happy hour drinks and appetizers at a nearby hangout of ours. I mean, Ferris Bueller may have been spoiled and snarky, but he did have a point:

Life moves pretty fast.
If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Product/technique notes

I was inspired by both this sketch from Let’s Get Sketchy as well as many aspects of the Paper Issues Pinspire Me image below:

Most of the patterned papers and stickers are from Echo Park’s “Creative Agenda” collection, and I hand stitched the colors around the inverted triangle element.

One for each arm: DT layout for Stuck?! Sketches

June 15, 2015 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 2 Comments

Today Stuck?! Sketches is revealing its mid-month sketch challenge and design team layouts. The sketch features three small photos and lots of opportunity to let your patterned papers shine:

Please join us over at the blog and allow the sketch and the design team inspire you to play along and add another beautiful layout to your scrapbook. And don’t forget that we have great sponsor prizes up for grabs as well!

Because it’s so close to Father’s Day, I decided to use this sketch with two photos from 1968 that show my dad as a new father of two. In the photo on the left my brother is just home from the hospital in January, and the right one was taken in the same place four months later. Look how we’ve both changed in that short time!

Product/technique notes

I used patterned papers from the Echo Park “Sisters” mini theme, and the embellishments came from an old Girls’ Paperie collection. I designed the title on the Silhouette.

Kiss kiss layout and string art tutorial

June 10, 2015 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 4 Comments

I’m so excited about today’s project because 1) I tried something new and 2) liked how it turned out, so 3) I want to share the idea with you! Do you remember doing string art projects as a kid? That’s what I incorporated on my layout as a frame for my small photo of Grandma helping me kiss my brand new brother in January 1968. Mom says I called him “B” (for baby).

My thought process

This idea came to me because of a sketch (as most of my scrappy ideas do). I was referencing this My Scraps and More sketch below, and I started thinking about how I wanted to create the central “tic-tac-toe” area of the page. I ticked off my options (get it?): strips of patterned paper, strips of washi tape, strips of ribbon, lines of stitching. Lines of stitching made me picture creating an elaborate hand stitched grid area to frame the photo. And then it hit me: string art!

I went to Pinterest and perused other artists’ string art in search of some ideas for making a square frame (as represented in the sketch). After successfully incorporating this technique into my page design, I thought I should share my process in case you like the look as much as I do.

String art tutorial

After deciding to make the string art area take up 8×8 inches in the center of the 12×12 page, I created a quick template for myself in my Silhouette Designer software. If you have a Silhouette and want to recreate this, draw an 8×8 square, center it on the page, open the rhinestones window and follow the settings below. If you don’t have a cutting machine, just measure and mark equidistant holes (perhaps 1/2 inch apart) with a ruler.

I cut out my simple template on a scrap piece of paper, lined it up over my background paper and poked the holes. Then the fun began!

I double matted the 3×3 photo with white cardstock and patterned paper so it would pop better off the background. Then I mounted that onto another pattern that was 6.25 square. Following the numbering system in the diagram below (up at 1, down at 2, up at 3, down at 4, etc.), I stitched away with two colors of embroidery thread to create the four corners of my square frame.

I do hope this tutorial was helpful to you. If you decide to try this technique on a page, I would LOVE to see it, so please come back and leave me a comment on this post. I will leave you kindly comments in return, I promise!

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