Layout Recipe #73 – Bear Birthday

This week’s layout is one that I found while browsing the gallery at The Sweet Shoppe, it’s by suzann and is entitled Bear Birthday! This layout caught my eye with it’s wonderful fabric feel, soft colours and gorgeous photo. I love how the colours in the layout match the colours in the photo, and the title work is wonderful! Please feel free to click on the image and leave this talented scrapper some love!

Ingredients List:

• Layout scraplifted from “Little Toes” by Sugarink
• Forget Me Not kit by Zoe Pearn
• Scalloped Mat (resized) is from Oh My Mat by Melissa Bennett
• Teeny Tiny Hearts (slightly recolored) and Dates-Wordy Bits by Kate Hadfield (Both retired)
• Stitching from Fresh Air kit by Traci Collins aka retrodiva (retired)
• Font for journaling is Pea Neek

What was your inspiration for the layout’s theme or design?

My inspiration came from this photo I took of my daughter after a recent trip to Build-A-Bear for her birthday! I wanted my page to have a “Hand-crafted” look to highlight the fact that she made her own bear. Because I made this layout for the Spin-a-lift challenge at SSD, I was looking in Sugarink’s gallery for something that would help me achieve the look I wanted. Her layout of Baby Toes was just what I was looking for, because the paper squares reminded me of quilt squares. My daughter’s bear also has a heart stitched on its chest and she named him “Hearty”, so I definitely needed some hearts on the layout as well. Kate Hadfield’s Teeny Tiny Hearts were perfect, and they added to the look I wanted.

What special techniques/actions/effects did you use if any in creating the layout?

I adjusted the levels of my photo and then used Traci Murphey’s Defog action to sharpen and brighten my picture. A lot of times that is enough to make my photo pop, but on this picture I did an additional step. I duplicated my photo to add overlay, softlight and screen layers. I then adjusted the opacity of each layer until it looked how I wanted it to.
I chose Zoe Pearn’s Forget me not kit because it had fabric looking paper as well as the colors that matched my daughter’s shirt. I adjusted my shadows so that the paper looked thicker to resemble fabric. The scallop mat was originally a square and I wanted a rectangle, so I simply duplicated the mat layer and then moved one down until it lined up and was a rectangle shape. The mat had little round cut-outs around it, and I erased the parts of the mats that were doubled up so that it looked like one mat and the cutouts weren’t filled in by the duplicate mat. I did end up covering up the cut-outs with the other paper, so I really didn’t need to erase after all. I then merged the two mat layers. I recolored one of the Teeny Tiny Hearts to better match the blue of the kit. For the title, I thought that the fabric alpha included with the kit would be too much for such a long title. So after making a Brown colored text title, I just laid the fabric looking Alpha over the initial letters. I then erased the B of the Brown Text so that it would not show through.

Thank you to my readers for checking out my blog today, I hope this layout has inspired you to mix and match some great products, and stretch your creativity! Please click on the layout above and leave this great scrapper some love!

Don’t forget that you can subscribe to my blog’s feed on any blog reader, this way you will never miss any of the information and inspiration brought to you on a weekly basis! And if you’d like to suggest a layout for me to showcase in my weekly Layout Recipes post, just fill out a contact form on the Contact Me page! You can suggest a layout of your own or someone else’s (I always get permission from the scrapper who created the actual layout before using it). Just make sure the layout uses 3+ different products! Thanks!

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.