kerrie gurney : Formal Cruising | Little Birdie Crafts

Thursday, July 9, 2020

Formal Cruising | Little Birdie Crafts

Hi Everyone Kerrie here welcome to July and my first post for Little Birdie Crafts for July.

Can you believe we are in the 2nd half of this unprecedented year?

I hope this post finds you all well and living your life wherever you are in the world as best you can.

As documenters of our families we must document the good, the bad and they WOW where did that come from moments and sometimes we get so caught up in making things so perfect that we lose our mojo to just create and have these special albums filled with all our treasured memories.

That is what this layout is about, these photos are from a cruise I taught on back in early 2016 which I am ashamed to say I still have so many photos from this cruise to scrap because of wanting to create the perfect layouts for all my photos, when the reality is I just need to get in and scrap and get my cruise album finished.

This layout has no special techniques it is just about creating layers to showcase my photos of my friends and I which is all you need to do to create beautiful layouts, especially if you want to get your albums finished. We don't always have 4-5 hours to create one layout.

I started this layout by cutting a scroll from my patterned paper making use of the floral border on the paper, I then fussy cut some clusters and another floral border piece for the top left hand side of my layout. I also cut some layers to mount under my photos. I distressed all the edges of my paper pieces to give texture and dimension. I layered all the pieces on using foam tape to give dimension and I always pop my tape away from the edges so I can easily tuck in my fussy cut pieces and them other embellishments later on

Now if you are liking the look of this nice flat layout you could stop here but if you want to embellish a bit more keep reading and scrolling

I have used Little Birdie Crafts Boho Dreams 12x12 Paper Pad for this layout

A great way to add dimension to your handmade flowers and leaves is to dry brush them using Gesso, it also help to soften down the colours if the flowers or embellishment are a bit too bright or slightly wrong colour

another tip to get more from your handmade flowers is to break them down, this is also great when you don't want a really lumpy bumpy layout. It also changes the look of your flowers to give you more variety

another way to change up your flowers and make them less bumpy is to remove the centre and add some bling again you just gently pull the bead from the centre

another tip for finishing off your layouts is to add splatters, splatters really change the look of your layout in a subtle way. For this layout I mixed some Gesso with a spritz of Hot pink Color Splash. Always remember to cover your photos before spattering as you can see I just used some packaging.

when creating clusters work in the rule of threes and also make sure your clusters draw your eye to your photos, while we love all our gorgeous Little Birdie Crafts products we want our photos to shine, so our creating is to make that happen