Twenty Twenty Scrapbooking: A New One

Hey folks! I hope you all had a bit of a break over the weekend. We had a perfectly egg-cellent time, with a visit to the House of Little E, and we're going out to meet up with friends this afternoon after leaving our boy to the airport. He has four weeks of term to do and then that will be his first year of Law over. It's very hard to believe. 

I haven't had a lot of time for scrapbooking over the weekend, and I'm betting I'm not the only one, so I thought now might be a good time to do another Twenty Twenty page (specially since this one features chocolate. Sort of.) Remember the idea? Twenty minutes to plan, twenty minutes to produce and twenty minutes to add the polish. This is what I finished up with:

Working from this as a sketch, without any of the planning? You might be done in half an hour! 

This is how I worked:

Twenty Minutes to:

- Make it easy for myself with a sepia toned photo: there are no colours to match, so I simply chose something soft. In the back of my mind I'm thinking I want it to look nostalgic, but not old fashioned. It's a modern look for an old photo, and keeping that thought right from the start helps me work quickly to make my other choices.

- Choose a coordinating piece of patterned paper. I looked for clues in the photo, because using what you can see to guide you cuts down on decision making, and I found something with a pattern which echoes the shapes you can see in the window. 

- Use a pre cut Project Life journaling card as a readymade photo mat

- Add a title. Truthfully? These are the only letters I had left in this pack, so I couldn't use a clever, long title even if I had wanted to - the font worked so nicely and the black stops the whole thing from looking washed out, so I'm not sweating it.

This is where I got to:

So, I took another twenty minutes to:

- work on my journaling. I typed it out on strips and after moving them around, I had to concede that the best place for them is where I had already placed the house. So I peeled it back off the page, telling myself the resulting mess would be covered by the strips. The more pages I make, the more I realise the ones I want to go back to are the ones with the story. So if that means upsetting the design to fit in the words, I'm going to do it. Where are we without the words?

- add more black with a Slice cut butterfly. For a fast page I think it can be tempting to grab lots of very themed product because you don't have to think about it. The butterfly is a bit more subtle. It has a nostalgic feel; but as it flutters about, it gives a nod to the idea of going backwards and forwards in time, looking at old photographs

- introduce more dimension with the button, which also echoes the flat smoothness of the aprons. At this point I rejected the idea of a brown seam binding bow because it would cover up those words, so I added twine for a "shop" look instead, to end up with this:

So, a final twenty minutes left, then, in which I:

- decide it was looking a little flat. So I grabbed the patterned paper sheet I cut the butterfly from and used it to make a border. TIP: Although it's always tempting to diecut very close to the edge of a sheet to save paper, if you leave a margin, then you'll have a border of paper left. Like gutting in reverse. With that in mind, I carefully trimmed the layout down slightly so the border would show.

- think I need a little more black. That's the very end of that alphabet, with the full stops acting like enamel dots.

- remember that I'm trying for modern vintage - so I added the pink washi tape to freshen it up and draw the eye to the story. So that I end up with the page I showed you at the beginning:

So that's my page in an hour. And as it's a local photo I'm going to use it as a reminder about my Jot Challenge for issue 5 Be a Tourist in Your Own Town. If you took any good out and about photos this weekend, you could put them to work and join in too.