one-page layouts

May the road rise up to meet you…

March 16, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

Sketch #92 on the Twisted Sketches site is available today! The sketch is for one vertical photo, and the twist this time is “brads.” Following is my contribution to the design team layouts that go up for inspiration:

May God hold you in the hollow of His hand.

The sketch included a place for a long-ish title, and because this week we celebrate St. Patrick’s Day I thought of using part of an Irish blessing for mine. This is a photo of my baby bro in Central Park when he took a Christmas trip to NYC this past December. I liked the effect of combining this Irish blessing for him with the idea of the road and travel.

To create the patterned paper highlight area behind the photo I cut small strips of travel-themed paper (Wander by BasicGrey) and punched some of them with a postage stamp border punch (Fiskars) and then layered them randomly. The last line of the Irish blessing is written on the ticket to the left of the picture.

I hope the design team’s interpretations of sketch #92 inspire you to use it for one of your photos.

Want a free Silhouette cut file I designed?

March 15, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 4 Comments

I really like the homemade paper-pieced look when I see other scrappers do it, but I don’t usually try that style myself. But this photo and title just screamed to me to give it a try.

I saw a poster a while back that said, “Wherever we are together that is home,” and I bookmarked it in my brain to use when the right photo came along. And then this past weekend I was flipping through a package of my photos and saw this one of my family. It was 1994, and my parents had decided to move from their home of 30 years in Ohio to Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Family friends held a going-away party for us, and this photo was taken at the end of it. I thought the story behind this photo fit that poster’s message perfectly.

So I created the title art in the Silhouette Studio software before cutting it twice to use here. If you have a Silhouette (this file will only work on this machine) and would like to use it on a layout of your own, please leave me a comment on this post telling me you’d like it, and I will email it to you. How’s that for a slice of fried gold?

Wherever we are together that is home

I’m really pleased with how this simple design turned out, so I’m sure I’ll find ways to do more with this homey, handmade look in the future.

Back in the saddle

March 13, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

I apologize for my long-ish absence, gentle readers. I was at a social media conference for my business, which took a considerable amount of time and energy (as conferences usually do). If you’re into social media you may have heard of PubCon, which covers topics within the Internet marketing world—search engine optimization, Twitter and FaceBook marketing, affiliate programs, etc. The event was quite good, and now I have to corral all the great ideas swimming around in my head and start acting on some of them for our tech support business.

Needless to say, I missed my blog and am ready to get back to it! To get this week rolling I offer today’s layout. It’s a photo I took a few years ago of my mom and her younger brother. They live many states apart from one another and don’t have a lot of opportunities to be together. So even though this time was to attend the funeral of a dearly beloved aunt, I couldn’t let the chance slip away to capture some photos of the two of them.

My mom and her younger brother, Terry

This freeze-frame moment

March 2, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo 1 Comment

Sketch #90 is now live at the Twisted Sketches blog. For this fun sketch “frame” was the twist. Here’s my interpretation:

Because I'm really good at faces I've picked out many celebrities in situations where nobody else noticed them.

The journaling on this layout may be hard to read: “I’m really good at recognizing faces. Always have been. I pick out celebrities in places where nobody else has noticed them. And when we watch movies I make it a sort of game to name in which other films or TV shows we’ve seen even the smallest of characters. Matt is always amazed.”

As usual there’s more to this story than I could fit on this layout. The fact is that since I was young I have been very quick to recognize a face if I have ever seen it before. For instance, when I was 9 years old (in 1976) my family, who was flying to California to visit my grandparents, was at the Cleveland airport. We were walking through the terminal when I recognized a man using a pay phone along the opposite wall and told my dad, “That’s Muhammad Ali.” My father didn’t at all think it was him, but I insisted. So we went closer. When we were just several feet away my dad finally agreed that it was the boxing legend. I was too shy to ask for his autograph, so my brother took a pen and our airline ticket envelope over to the man with the phone under his chin and got his signature. Phil has that autograph to this day, which I repeatedly tell him I deserve to have because I was the one who recognized Mr. Ali in the first place! Are you reading this, Phil?

Years later I recognized astronaut and senator John Glenn walking alone out to an airport parking lot. I was traveling with my husband and brother, and Mr. Glenn passed us as we were heading toward the terminal. Matt and Phil had no idea that we had just walked right past a living legend, but I will never forget that moment.

Over the years I have honed these skills so that now I almost instantly recognize/can name actors in shows we watch, no matter where or when I’ve seen them before (and often no matter how little of their faces I can see). Matt loves to pull up the Internet Movie Database to check my work. This little game has become part of the entertainment for us.

Go green: Recycling your designs is good for creativity

February 23, 2011 By Janice Daquila-Pardo Leave a Comment

Once you’ve created a layout would you consider it a crime to reuse that design? Are you a one and done kind of scrapper?

Let me show you why I believe designs should be a reusable resource in your scrap stash.

Just below is a layout I completed a while ago. It’s a portrait of my husband and his siblings when he was in high school. It’s a rather simple design that relies on good old-fashioned color blocking and a few embellishments.

This layout follows a simple color-blocked design.

Now here is another layout of Matt’s family, taken years later. I used the same design as the first; in fact, I didn’t even flip the side on which the photo is situated. Because the photo, patterned papers and embellishments are different the resulting designs really don’t resemble each other that much. In fact, I believe that unless I pointed out to someone looking at the family album that these two layouts share the same structure, they would be very unlikely to see that on their own. Even when held next to each other it’s the differences that take the viewer’s focus.

This layout follows the same color-blocked design but uses different papers and embellishments.

When you find a design you like, I say “reuse, recycle, re-imagine.”

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