Wednesday - June 17, 2015

Good Morning!

I am super excited to be here with you this morning! This is my first post on the Citrus Twist Blog and I am going to be sharing what I did with the main Pocket Life Kit and the "Sprinkles" add-on!

This spread was created with just the main Pocket Life Kit "Do Fun Stuff".

I couldn't get them to photograph very well, but I loved those black strip stickers with the gold phrases!

These next few spreads use both the main kit and the "Sprinkles" add-on!

On this page, I dumped all the gold sequins in one pocket and sewed it up. I transparent elements in my pocket pages! I also created another one by taking the acrylic tag with gold triangles on it and stitched down the word "sunshine" on it and slipped it into the lower right hand pocket.

When I first started out creating these albums four years ago, I started with the 12x12 size. This year, I switched it up and am using the 9x12 album. I LOVE this size, but I had a lot of the 12x12 album pages left over. I have been using these up by just trimming them down! I love that it gives a lot of variety and some slightly different sized pages. So, if you still have those larger pages left over and you have switched to a different size, make it work!

Thanks for stopping by and happy scrapping!

Sunday Sketch with Melissa

Hello, everyone! Melissa here with you today, and I have another one of Kasia's fantastic sketches for our regular Sunday Sketch challenge post!

I quite often use two photos on my layouts, and sometimes I feel like I get stuck in a rut with ways to arrange the photos and the papers and elements around them. Having a sketch to work from helps me to shake things up, and I loved how the offset layers in this arrangement added something just a little bit different, but still balanced, to the page.

All of the supplies for this layout came from the main kit, and I loved all of the "star" themed items this month- especially the exclusive wood veneers!

To play along with our sketch challenge simply upload your layouts to our gallery by June 21st with "Sketch 6/15" in the title. You'll be entered to win a $5 gift certificate to the Citrus Twist store!

6x6 Paper Play with Melissa

Hi, everyone! Melissa here today with a quick and easy way to use the 6x6 paper pads in Citrus Twist's Pocket Life kits on your traditional layouts.

Grids are one of my favorite layout designs, whether they're "loose" grids or more formal ones like the grid on this layout. I started by cutting pieces of patterned paper from the South of Market 6x6 pad in the June Pocket Life kit into 3x3 squares, and then I printed two photos at 3x3 and one at 3x6. When working with a grid I like to have some squares where everything is contained to the grid and some squares where a photo or embellishment runs outside the lines of a grid section.

It was a happy accident that the printed chipboard frame from the Open Road chipboard (from the Main kit's Embellishment Add-On) sheet fit into one of the grid squares, and I used it as a place to hold my journaling. I've really enjoyed typing out my journaling for my traditional layouts lately and not just in Project Life, and I used a circle shape in my word processor (Pages on a Mac) to format my journaling, then removed both the outline and the fill on the shape before printing so that just the words would show up.

For some squares I embellished with brightly colored chipboard pieces, but I wanted something a little more subtle in the space shown in the photo below. I used a stitching template to add a little camera to one corner of the square, and I liked the hand-stitched look that I decided to add a border around the whole page!

Designs like grids that use lots of small pieces of patterned paper are a great way to use your 6x6 paper pads, and the best part is that you can totally change the look to suit your style. You can go clean and simple with a graphic look, get artsy with mixed media, or layer to your heart's content!

Be Inspired By Cut Apart Sheets

Hi, everyone! Melissa here with you today with three layouts that use my favorite paper in the May kits, the square cut apart sheet from Webster's Pages Our Travels collection.

With all the fun designs on this single sheet of paper, it's like getting an entire embellishment collection all at once, and I started out by using it to create a block design below the photo on this layout.

I alternated a square from the cut apart sheet with a square cut from a piece of woodgrain paper in the kits. Each of the woodgrain squares also has a heart punched in it, backed by more Our Travels paper, then overlaid with one of the gold Maggie Holmes word stickers.

This next layout brings in lots of patterns from the 6x6 Our Travels paper pack from the Pocket Life kit.

I arranged strips of the papers down the left side of the page, then used squares cut from both the 12x12 version of the cut apart sheet along with tiny squares from the 6x6 version of the same paper (included in the paper pack) as accents.

And of course I used more of the tiny squares from the 6x6 version of the same pattern as embellishment on my Pocket Life layout this month, too!

After finishing these three layouts, I still had lots of pretty squares left from this design. I love it when cut-apart sheets are included in the kits!

A Two Page Layout Using a 6x6 Paper Pad

Each Wednesday on the blog we bring you a dose of inspiration for using the 6x6 paper pads in our Pocket Life kits, and today I've got a double dose for you! I used my 6x6 pad on a two-page, multi-photo layout, which is a great way to both get lots of photos scrapped at once and to use up quite a bit of paper in the pad!

My idea for this layout started with this sketch from PageMaps- I've always loved Becky's sketches!

At first glance, it looks like the patterned paper in the sketch is in two main blocks- a big 12x12 piece offset on the right, and a pair of 5x12 strips running across the middle of the page. You could absolutely use those paper sizes on this design, but if you look more closely, you can also see that there's an opportunity to use smaller pieces, too. None of the blocks is over 6 inches in either length or width, meaning that you can cut those pieces from a 6x6 sheet of paper! I flipped through the pad and pulled out two sheets each of the yellow and purple prints, and, with a little careful measuring and alignment, pieced them together with my photos to make this page!

I also used two sheets of another print- an orange floral- to use as the photo mats where they were specified in the sketch.

Since the photos were already quite busy and the patterned papers very bright, I kept the embellishments to a minimum and used lots of neutrals- the cork butterflies, the black letter stickers, and the wood chip hearts.

The only item on the layout that wasn't in this month's kits is the journaling card- I needed something sort of plain and neutral, so I reached for a cream ledger print card and layered a tag from one of the Maggie Holmes cut apart sheets over it.

Next time you start to use a sketch that looks like it uses big blocks of patterned paper, look again and see if it's possible to break those sections down into smaller chunks and use a 6x6 pad instead!

Be Inspired By Collage with Melissa

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines collage as:

"an artistic composition made of various materials (as paper, cloth, or wood) glued on a surface"

And a Wikipedia article on the subject begins:

Collage (From the French: coller, to glue, French pronunciation: ​[kɔ.laːʒ]) is a technique of an art production, primarily used in the visual arts, where the artwork is made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole.

Scrapbook layouts certainly sound a lot like collages, according to those definitions! We tend to think of a certain style when we hear the word "collage" though- something a little less structured and more random than a scrapbook page- and I've collected a few examples of gorgeous collage artwork from around the web to inspire you today.

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I was inspired to bring that collaged look to one of my layouts this month after seeing the gorgeous multi-color patterned paper sheet included in the Main kit (all supplies on this layout are from that kit).

I started by taking a haphazard slice from that sheet, then layered in the stitched border (a little collage in and of itself!), die cuts, and other embellishments and papers until I was happy with the look. I didn't think too much about balance or lines or symmetry- I just went with what looked right, and I was surprised and delighted when this page was finished in under 45 minutes!

Collage style is also a great way to use up a pile of scraps- simply layer them up until you're happy with the composition!

Sunday Sketch + Guessing Game #2

Happy Sunday, everyone! Melissa here with this week's Sunday Sketch and layout to share, along with a peek at the contents of the upcoming March kits.

Let's start off with Kasia's sketch...

...and my layout based on it.

I made just a few modifications to make the sketch work with my subject, including leaving out the smaller photograph and using mist and glitter splatters in place of the pencil scribbles.

I loved the strips across the tops and bottom of the page (and often use these in my regular layouts, too!), and added some small embellishment clusters to them to complete the diagonal line across the page started by the mist + glitter.

The products on this page are a mix of all of this month's kits, so you're getting a peek at everything that will be released on the 5th. Be sure to leave a comment on this post with your guesses at to the products that will be in the new releases at reveal, and you'll be entered to win a gift certificate to the Citrus Twist shop!

Two Page Layout Tutorial with Melissa

Hello, and happy Tuesday, everyone! Melissa here with your weekly tutorial, and today I'm going to walk you through my process for putting this two-page layout together, using the February kits from Citrus Twist.

I started off by choosing a background and briefly considered using two different papers- one patterned and one cardstock. I've used this type of design before, and it works quite well as long as you use something- like strips of patterned paper that span both sides- to tie the two pages together.

I have another layout with a similar mismatched background in this same album, though, so I opted instead to cut the gray star paper down to 11.5" x 11.5" and have it span two sheets of white cardstock, making it the element that ties the background together.

This pile of photos doesn't really have a story behind it- they're just random shots from a day at a Star Wars convention- and I wanted to put them all on one layout to be a wrap-up for the "Day 1" section of the album (I was there for four days!).

The hardest part of a two-page layout for me is the photo arrangement, and I went through three different ones before landing on one that I liked. I started with a large group of photos off to the right, with fewer on the left so I'd have room for my title and journaling. At this point I also picked up a card from the Pocket Life kit and a piece from one of the cut-apart sheets to work in with my photos.

I wasn't entirely happy with the first arrangement, so I tried again, this time going for more of a loose grid that ran in a line across the center of the page. This time I felt like everything was just kind of sitting in the middle with nothing to lead the eye across the page, so I tried one more time...

...and came up with this! The photos in my final arrangement are grouped in sections, and the trio of groupings flows in a loose diagonal up from the bottom left to the top right.

I was finally happy with the photo placement, so I moved on to the next step- adding patterned paper and embellishment layers around and behind the photos. This is the step where you can fill in any awkward gaps in your photo arrangement with little tags, tabs, and more pieces from cut-apart sheets. I also worked a piece of paper from the 6x6 pad in the Pocket Life kit onto the page.

With the basic structure in place, I added my title and a few more embellishments, including the start of a little cluster on the top left. I also worked in one more piece of 6x6 patterned paper under the bottom left cluster of photos.

After that, it took just a few more tiny pieces and some journaling to finish the layout off!

I never really start a two-page layout with a plan, and I generally follow these basic steps every time I make one. I've found that once I find a pleasing photo arrangement, the rest of it comes together quickly!