Template Tuesday (with a recipe).

As someone that loves a good recipe for a layout design, I love the Make It Scrappy/Make It Snappy challenges (MIS) with Polly Monica and Scrapping with Liz but I missed last weekend’s as we were out but the recipe sparked inspiration so I’m belatedly playing along and calling this a Template Tuesday post!

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m not good at starting with a blank canvas, so templates are often a starting point for my pages and adding in a ‘recipe’ always gives me extra guidance and also restriction so I don’t throw everything on the page or look through every folder in my stash, but sometimes I still throw the kitchen sink on there as a more maximalist scrapper, and today’s page definitely ends up more maximalist!

If you didn’t see it or play along either, here’s the recipe from the September MIS.

It’s called ‘Good Things Come in Threes’:
3 animals (can be elements or photos)
3 journal cards (can be cropped)
3 word title (can be word art)
3 stamps
3 green paper pieces

The animals prompt gave me permission to scrap bird photos, of which I have an endless supply and so I chose some that I could think of a 3 word title for (in my head I had ‘birds and books’ or ‘on my shelf’ or ‘lost in books’) and then went searching for a SwL template that works with both a portrait and landscape orientation pair of photos that had a few paper spots for the 3 green papers at least. Her store has a handy category for 1-3 photo templates and I browsed it first. Searching the store and my stash I used the keywords: books, read, birds and green.

Here’s my starting point using A Slice of Life 2 templates by Scrapping with Liz that I flipped vertically so that it looks like the photos are sitting on a shelf. Seeing the potential in a template with the variation just twisting and flipping creates is one of the things I love about scrapping with them the most.

I duplicated the same photo and clipped it in 2 spots…

and then decided to make the fact that they were the same photo more obvious by duplicating it again and popping it behind some of the template layers

I then brought in the other photo I planned to use originally in that portrait spot and shrunk it for the square spot, planning to use the partial extraction method from a previous blog post on my yellow birds tail. Ticking/Checking the green paper pieces off the recipe was my next step. I had Sara Gleason’s Chapters papers in my stash and the 2 greens in that palette worked with some of the books on my shelf and that guided my paper placement of the polka dot and jade floral papers. I extended the big handcut piece and moved the scalloped piece from the template down. 

Next I tried to add in the 3 journal cards – again looking through my stash, i went looking for an old library date stamping slip given we also needed to include stamps, i thought this would be a good spot to do some stamping on and tie in with the book theme. I pulled out Unwritten by ForeverJoy that has a coordinating Journal Card pack that has a neutrals plus a few pops of green and pink colour scheme and added 3 cards and a ticket kind of stacked, making the photo cluster larger.

Because I forgot I had the animals step taken care of already, I went looking for bird stamps and used 2 from Rachel Jefferies- Seasonal Stamps, as well as a star cluster stamp

Now because the upside down, back to front title has been annoying me, I put in some wordart as a 3 word title from Highstreet Stories by One Little Bird. Again it was a kit that turned up in the green books search but having already et the green paper recipe ingredient, I added some extra (non-green) papers to the scallops and bracket piece (that part of the template made me think ‘bookend’ so it was part of the template that sold me on scrapping these photos with it). I also did some shadowing and shadow tweaking at this point.

And you know because I put in that one circle wordart for the title and because I’m not great at stopping myself from adding everything, I felt like ‘why not add more circles?’ So here’s where I go a bit circle crazy. To see whether I reign it back in, you’ll just have to wait til the end of this journey. Those cool shiny lime green circles are from Unwritten by ForeverJoy and so is the ‘why not?’ flair, which coincidentally is how I figured the chirpy conversation between my 2 birds on the shelf went, with the yellow one, the troublemaker and ring leader chirping to the grey one, “Want to find a good book & a cozy nook?’, and the grey one replying ‘why not’ before finding a spot behind the tissue box with the tissues a handy nesting material. And so because I thought the grey one was easily missed, I decided to circle him – again, from Unwritten. The coffee cup ring overlay is from Highstreet Stories.

So now if you’ve been feeling anxious like me about the number of animals recipe point and only having 2 bird stamps on there, I figured I was not counting my photo subjects as animals for scrapping purposes and went looking for another suitable (& small) animal element in my stash, because obviously I had a fair amount going on on the page already. I ended up in Sara Gleason’s Good Things kit folder and here’s my finished page, including the partial extraction using the Quick Selection tool on Steve’s tail in the middle photo spot.

Thanks to that butterfly bead/button from Sara’s Good Things, I pulled some more wordstrips that went with the story of vigilance that is the hide and seek life with somewhat free range indoor birds, and then feeling the page was a bit too dark and only had that one pop of pink in the notebook journal card, I pulled out a few of Sara’s Petals packs to try in place of the scallop on the template. I duplicated the colourful painty one I chose from Petals No.6 and moved the top edge to peek out above the photo cluster, because what’s another layer at this point? The background also became a blend of 2 papers from her Chapters paper pack, with those lines giving another anchor point to the page. The doodled circles ended up feeling a bit too much and this tied cord also from Good Things took it’s place. I also dropped the opacity on the jade floral paper to make it more vellum-y so the white shelf line behind it could be more easily seen to be continuous, linking all the photos.

So here’s my finished page and the template side by side. I always like seeing how far I’ve come from the bones of a sketch or template and how much I’ve changed it, especially when a template is more minimal and my page isn’t.

And if you are a template scrapper too, make sure to check out and play along with the monthly TLP Template Challenge in the forum. Scrapping with Liz has provided the freebie for this month and I’m looking forward to scrapping with that too. Bye for now.