Couture Creations - Guest Designing

It's such a privilege to be asked to be a guest designer for Couture Creations this month.

I had fun creating layouts with the new Sea Breeze collection, especially stretching myself to see the collection as more than just pretty paper, but as a means to embellish a page and add to the memory.

For my first layout I didn't want to go too traditional on the beach theme, yet I still wanted to create the rustic feel, so chose to use the green knots paper with a subtle strip of the blue check for the foundation of my page. Once the photos were decided on and printed, they were all mounted on the blue paper.

I then decided that the page needed just a little something extra.... and so began a two day experiment (and drama) of how to cut a stamp with my Curio machine... well in the end I designed a simple compass and cut it out of craft foam. Once cut, I ran it through my StickerMaker and then attached it to an acrylic block.... unbeknownst to me.. I put it upside down.Thankfully I had test stamped it first on a scrap piece and discovered this. So peeled off the letters, found some foam ones in my stash and adapted my stamp.... happy days. I stamped the compass at an angle and half off the page just for a bit of extra effect and rustic feel.

The next corner of my page to get a treatment, was the bottom right. For this I used the Netting and the card that it is packaged on. I cut the card to be the same size as my photos on the right... a 3x4" rectangle. I then pulled off the front of the board to distress it and ran my inkpad all over it too.... made it all inky and brown.

This card as well as two of the cards off the embellishment sheet, finished off the block of photos on the right page.

To create the netted corner, I simply took the whole bundle of net and snip snip here and there near the knots till I had a strip of about 10cm off the top. I then lay this over the page and snipped and gathered till it looked right. I tucked some shelled behind the net and then applied glue to each knot to attached the net to the page.

For the anchor, I fussy cut around the anchor on the .... page and then simple tucked it into the netting. Here is a closeup for a bit more detail.

The last embellishment I added to the page was the bunting across the top. These are already pre-cut in the embellishment page. There were enough of each one to go across the whole page. I again just snipped a few strands of the netting to make a long single knotted strand which I glued across the top of the flags.

For my journalling strip, I typed this out on the pc and printed it on plain white card which I then inked in a few different shades of green, blue and brown before attaching to my page.

I finished off the layout with a few ink splats scatted around.