I don’t know about you, but my scrapbooking style has definitely changed over the years. I started with my cutesy pages, then went through a phase of everything needing to be very much measured and in line before hitting that stage where the more supplies that were on the page, the better I thought the layout would be. For the last few years though, I’ve followed one little rule of composition and it’s made me happier with my crafting process. This one little rule has made me scrap faster and use my supplies, so now I avoid bad habits of my past: stacks of unfinished layouts and stacks of unused product. Plus I figure if I enjoy making it and I enjoy the end result, it’s right for me whether everyone likes it or not. (And you know, I think that’s something we all need to embrace right up front: there is no way to make a scrapbook page that every person on the earth will love and admire. If it’s not possible to please everyone with one single pizza flavour, sports car, oil painting or classic novel, it’s not going to happen with a scrapbook page. Love what you make and admire what you like from others...and let the rest just pass you by. If that means this process, so be it. You’ll find something that works for you, and that will be even more fabulous.)
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Before I even get started with my one little rule of composition, I start with my story and my photos. In this case, the photos aren’t amazing, but they help tell a little story I want to write down, and that’s all the motivation I need at the moment. With photos in hand, I grab a few sheets of paper to get started...I like to grab at least one sheet each of cardstock, patterned paper and journaling paper, so I have all my basic needs met before I start. Then I might add a few extras, like this time I actually went for three patterns. I’ll also need some letters and probably some labels, plus my basics: scissors, trimmer, adhesive.
Now I’m ready to go and I start with that one little rule. Mrs Leonard, the journalism teacher at my high school, would be so proud right now. Because that little rule is one she called ‘Avoiding Trapped White Space’. But I tend to call it ‘Stick Everything in the Middle’. Both work just fine. What Mrs Leonard meant was that you should build from the inside of the page to the outside, and if you have any extra space, it goes on the outside, not stuck in some awkward position in the middle. Think about the front page of a newspaper. What if it was a slow news day, and nothing seemed important enough to be right in the middle of the page? Wouldn’t it look totally stupid with a big empty gap in the middle? So no matter how slow the news day, something has to go there. If there’s space leftover, it goes at the edge...and the newspaper will fill it with advertising anyway.
So I start with my cardstock and my photos, and I know that they will roughly go in the middle of the page, so I find a basic layout that will work. The top photo is actually pretty poorly composed, with too much blur in the bottom right corner, and the story links more to the parking meter anyway (don’t worry...everything will be explained), so I can overlap the photos and still be able to show the street that relates to the story. With that figured out, I put the photos aside and work on what’s going to go underneath them.
This is where it gets totally haphazard but also speeds up my scrapping process hugely. I just cut boxes and stick them down. Really. I have no real method to this madness other than knowing after you have made pages for a while, you will realize there are only so many places for things to go in a 12x12 space. So just cut and stick stuff in a basic way, so you can work on top of it. I vaguely knew where my photos would go, so there’s not a lot of fancy layering that will get covered up in the top half of the page, and the smaller strip of paper is at the bottom so it will show below the photos. Plus there’s no trapped white space. I started by covering the very center of the page, then worked my way out, so there are no gaps in the middle. That means it should work in the end. We’ll get there.
Now that the background is there, stick the photos on top of that. Yep, still sticking as we go. (If sticking as you go sounds scary, I will let you in on a little secret: the worst that can happen is you stick down something and you don’t like it. So you stick something on top of it to cover it up. And you can keep doing that over and over again. I once had someone comment that they loved the layered look I had created in a layout and she counted up that I had ten layers of paper. Little did she know that was purely because I had made nine mistakes and layer ten and been just the trick. So really...just stick it down. It will be fine.)
Yes, when I get to this step, I tend to cover up a lot of patterned paper. I don’t let it bother me. I have enough patterned paper to wallpaper my entire home several times, so I’ve decided it’s best just to use it. Plus there is nothing wrong with making heavy, sturdy pages, as they tend to last longer without falling apart!
Now I need a place to tell the story, and I still want to follow that one little rule, so here’s where I start with the Stick It All In The Middle approach. Some lined paper and a label, and they’re going right in the middle of the page, overlapping just enough that I don’t have any gaps. Keeping Mrs Leonard happy.
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I’ll admit here that I don’t think titles are my strongest point. I tend to go with really obvious things and I don’t always make them fit in a way that would make Mrs Leonard happy at all. But hear me out. I didn’t have the letters left to spell out anything clever like ‘Feed the Meter’ so I went with something obvious that would feed into my story, plus I had the letters for it. That’s big in my book. Using the letter stickers. It would fit all in one line, if I let the NG go over the second photo. The English teacher in me probably thinks that would be better because the odd break in the word makes me think this is about golf -- someone who is called the Par King -- and I don’t know the first thing about golf. But I do know there are no parking meters on the course. So really, there’s not a lot of logic to this placement other than starting with the G and working backwards, and keeping it all in the center of the page. Just that little rule. Plus if you’re placing embellishment over a photo, you’ll want to keep an eye on the parts of the photo you still want to be visible.
Then comes stage two: journaling. I grab more supplies -- a journaling stamp, ink pad, letter stamps and a pen. (Both stamps here are from Fontwerks.) This stuff stays pretty much the same for all my layouts, though I swap from brown to black ink and grab different journaling and letter stamps. But in some form or another, this is what I’m grabbing for stage two of every layout.
Now I can add something to the title without adding more huge letter stickers, and everything is still sitting right there in the middle of the page.
And I could write straight on the lines of the patterned paper, but I’ve pulled out this stamp so I might as well use it. (No really, that is the full amount of logic on this one. I hate it when I pull things out and don’t bother to use them, so nine times out of ten, I just use it.)
I already have the story in mind -- sometimes written down, sometimes not. Either way I won’t know how much space it will fill up until I start writing, so I just start and see what happens. If I run out of space, I add something else to write on or I find a way to say less. This time I just added another label and kept on writing until I had said all I wanted. I don’t really embellish until I make sure I’ve got all that down, so I know how much space I have left. _For stage three -- the embellishment -- I grab a few more things. On the left, I have a stack of my go-to items. I use things from this stack all the time -- on more than half of the layouts I’ve made in the last few months. Right now that stack has a bunch of stickers from Scenic Route and 7 Gypsies. On the right is a stack of embellishments I’m using now, having saved them for...six years. Yep. Loved them so much I didn’t want to use them. So now I am using them before I stop loving them. And in the middle are a few things i just grabbed because they might work with the colours and theme. (If time is vaguely related, I will grab the chipboard clock. As of this moment, I have used the grand total of: one. But I keep trying.)
I like for the embellishment to naturally evolve from the journaling sometimes, so I found a word sticker that would fit and added an extra sentence to extend the journaling down to the bottom of the page, making sure there are no gaps by layering stickers on top of diecuts and bits of patterned paper. (In case you haven’t gotten it by now, I took a picture of the parking meter just after we fed it full of quarters, only to realize it was a M-F parking meter and we were paying on a Sunday. Clearly we are both amazingly intelligent.) Then I added just a few more little bits of embellishment, all following that line and leaving no gaps.
And this is the end result, with everything weighted into the middle of the page, and any leftover space hanging out on the edges. There’s a focus on the story I wanted to tell, I like the look and the embellishments, and I’ve used three patterned papers, two die-cuts, one metal frame and a handful of stickers that otherwise would still be languishing in my stash. But wait. I didn’t use the whole sheet of paper. Which is my personal pet peeve at the moment. So before I cleaned up (because let’s face it: I would always prefer to scrap than to clean up, wouldn’t you?), I grabbed another sheet of cardstock and the next set of photos on my table and used the same supplies to make this:
_Same process, same supplies, but looks different enough for me! And now I have a lot less to clean up, because I used it up instead. Which I think is way more fun...and also because I know if I put a scrap of paper away, I am never going to remember to use it. Clearly my own little mental block there, but this seems like a decent way around it.
Following this little rule of sticking everything in the middle, I scrap most of my pages in 30-45 minutes, plus the second page is usually even quicker. If I draw my pages out, I get too bored (and convinced that I won’t like them) so sticking it down and keeping it quick works for me.
Here’s the kicker: this month, it’s your turn to try this composition technique. Grab your photos and your supplies and see what happens when you stick-and-go! Take a picture, upload it to the gallery and add ‘Stick-And-Go’ in your title. You never know -- we might pick your layout and feature your stick-and-go skills, and Mrs Leonard might even send you a gold star.
