Guest Designer - Courtney

Our guest designer this week is Courtney Holgate. Courtney joined in a "Trading Faces" swap with the Idaho Scrappers, where she did a layout with pictures from Heather.

Thank you, Courtney, the layout is amazing!

Imagine the pressure that I felt, after signing up for a Trading Faces swap for the first time, getting Heather, one of the most admired scrapbookers and photographers in the group, as a partner. I knew instantly that I had to really bring it in order to do the super cute pictures of her daughter Abby justice.

After going through my stack of designer paper to see what jumped out to me, I decided on a couple of sheets from Phoebe by Basic Grey.


Sometimes I find that designer paper with large elements is difficult to work with since you don't want to cover up the large portions of the paper. I mean, that's the entire point of the design paper right? So working with this paper and the enlarged photograph of Abby, I decided to cut along the large flowers of the patterned paper and layer them over the photograph and the title block. After cutting the flowers out with an Exacto knife and sliding the picture or the title block underneath the cut out portions, I used a little pop dot to add a little dimension to the over all layout. This technique aloud me to use the enlarged photo+title block+designer paper, without loosing the large elements of the designer paper that I loved so much.


After trying to think of something a little more cleaver, I finally decided on "Beautiful Ballerina" for my title, creative I know. I thought for sure I had a Making Memories rub on in white of the word "beautiful" but after rummaging through my stash all I was able to find was black. I decided that, instead of going to the trouble of hand lettering or rubbing on each individual letter of the word, I would just use the black rub on and go over it with my whito Signo Uniball pen. I love that pen! This is an easy tip to turn rub ons white or just add a little white accent here or there.





Once I finished the title page, assembling the second page was a breeze, something I was a little stressed out about since I typically do one page layouts. I chose another sheet from the Phoebe collection with a similar pattern, repeated the cardstock used on the title page and decided on two 4x6 pictures, and a 5x7 picture (the 5x7 was my favorite out of the bunch that Heather sent). The two 4x6 photos were adhered on the ends of a 6.5x12 sheet of fushia cardstock, then the 5x7 was matted on a piece of yellow cardstock and I tied some ribbon around it. Since the 5x7 was my favorite photo, I wanted it to stand out a little more, so I popped it up with pop dots when I added it to the layout.


Once the basic aspect of the two layouts were finished I decided I needed to jazz it up a bit. I added pearls in the middle of the large flowers on the title page as well as on the corner of some of the photos. I also added some Prima flowers on the second layout to give it some umph.


Even though this was a real challenge for me, I really enjoyed creating these pages for Heather and Abby. I hope she enjoys them as much as I did!