A Boy's Life

The secret's out: I'm a keener! In early February, at our first design team meeting, Emma gave us all one project that had to be done by the end of the month. I was done the next day!

When the design team met again at the end of February, Emma asked me if I wanted to do an extra project for March and I enthusiastically said yes! I left the store that day with two extra projects: a product review (which will be coming in early April) and this one.

I have a 3-year old boy named Sam. So when Emma gave me the paper for this project, I was very happy! The collection is A Boy's Life by Echo Park. I have to say up front that Echo Park is one my favourite scrapbooking companies. Their lines are perfect for scrapbookers who want to create layouts featuring their children.

I managed to make two layouts with the 5 papers I had from the line.

My Friend Caleb

This layout showcases pictures I took in December 2010 of Sam and his friend Caleb playing together. I used several techniques on this layout, including using the Sea Easy to add the faux stitching detail at the top and bottom of the page; using a border punch and Distress Ink in Broken China; using another border punch to add a horizontal border at the bottom on the page; using pop-up tape to add dimension; and sanding the edges of my main photo. You can see a close-up of these techniques below:

One of the things I love about the Echo Park collections are the accompanying sticker sheets. Usually, you get one alphabet sticker sheet and one with designs. I used both in this layout.

Alphabet sticker sheet:

I used a few border pieces from the other sticker sheet.

Nothing says that you have to use the stickers "as is". As shown in one of the pictures above, I took the orange zig zag border piece and cut it to use it as a mini-border on the side of two pictures. One of my complaints about stickers (of the non-chipboard variety at least) is that they lack dimension. To fix this, I used pop-up tape on some of the stickers. It allowed me to layer stickers, like I could have done with flowers:

Fun with Alfie

The second layout I created with this collection is one featuring Sam and our cat Alfie.

I used similar techniques to the last layout, but a few different ones, including: sanding the edges of the pictures; using stickers and using pop-up tape for some of them; ripping the edge of one of the papers and inking that edge; and using a border punch to create a border:

Notice that I used different alphabet stickers on this layout. With this collection, there were 3 different sets.

The technique that really worked out but doesn't show through on the pictures is the crackle paint on the die cut used to mat the journalling box (by the way, the journalling box was on the sticker sheet). I used Tim Holtz Distress Crackle Paint. I then used Distress Ink in Broken China and rubbed the ink on top of the crackle.

I'm so happy with these pages! It just goes to show that the combination of techniques and stickers can work well together.

Happy scrappin'!