Tag Archives: fall

Creating a Background Effect with Handwriting

Posted on by
15

handwriting background techniqueWelcome to the Make It Monday blog hop. If you’ve come from Gina Zee’s site, you’re in the right place! She always has clever up-cycling/recycling ideas for crafting! I’ll give you info on all the sites in this week’s blog hop at the end of this post so you don’t miss anything you may be interested in!

Have you ever thought about creating your own background paper with your own handwriting? Now before you tune me out, I don’t want to hear any, “My handwriting is awful!” because it doesn’t even matter for the technique I’m going to show you. This can actually be a way to do some disguised journaling. Or you can just use words that relate to a certain theme. You don’t even have to use full sentences. The choice is yours, and there is no right or wrong way to do this.

First you’ll need to decide what you’ll use for your background. This technique could easily be used for scrapbooking, art journaling, mixed media, card making, or whatever else you can think of to use it for. Then you’ll need something to write with that is a water soluble medium. Today I’m just going to use water color pencils. They are readily available and not too expensive, and hopefully you already have some on hand.

I took a couple of water color pencils in colors I wanted to coordinate with the fall theme I had in mind and I just randomly wrote about the fall season. See, I don’t have great handwriting, and I didn’t even try to be neat.
handwriting-background-1

Even though I had already written on card stock, instead of just jumping in, I decided to first try this on water color paper. I did more “journaling” about fall with watercolor pencils and on the top of the page I brushed on water to activate the water color pencils. On the bottom, I simply used a baby wipe, with no additional water. The bottom created the look I was after!

Testing in watercolor paper journal

Testing the method in a water color paper journal. The top was brushed with water, the bottom buffed with a baby wipe.

Since the look I liked didn’t use water, I knew it would work on card stock without treating the card stock in any special way.  I decided to create a scrapbook layout with a photo I had taken, so I grabbed out a sheet of off-white card stock to make the background. This time I added a bit of a third color to the writing, a bit of yellow over some of the brown and the orange. Then I used a baby wipe and buffed in a circular motion. You can blend as much as desired. You don’t need to be able to read any of the words to realize that it is handwriting. If the wipe becomes too dry, grab another one, or dampen it ever so slightly.

Filled page with journaling about the fall season

Filled page with journaling about the fall season.

Now I created my layout. The leaves and tiny “title” were stamped with pigment ink, heat embossed, and the leaves cut out. The stamp set is “Fall Harvest, #C1504” from Close to My Heart. Bronze Shimmer Trim was added for a bit more pizazz. The outer edges were inked and buffed, as well.

The finished layout

The finished layout.

The yellow leaf was raised up a bit with foam squares to add just a bit more dimension.

Foam squares were used to raise the yellow leaf

Foam squares were used to raise the yellow leaf.

Overall, I was pleased with the outcome. I would use the handwriting effect again. I think it would be perfect for art journaling, and I can’t wait to try in on a mixed media piece with a different water soluble medium to write with!

Visit the other Make it Monday sites below and please feel free to shop my Close to My Heart online store if you live in the US.

Make It Monday blog hop participants this week.

Cheers to YOUR Artful Adventures!

KS

Pumpkin Patch 12 Photo Scrapbook Layout

Posted on by
2

Here is the scrapbook page I promised to show you with pictures of our outing to the pumpkin patch. I have also included a video to walk you through some of the elements of the page and give you some other information about the layout. You may watch it here, or read a brief description below the video.

I decided to make create this page digitally, because I had more pictures than time to scrap them onto several pages. So I decided to go ahead and use a lot of them on a single layout. That’s one of the benefits of using digital images, you can resize them as needed!

 

Since I was going to use several photos on the page I decided I would start with a layered template that used a lot of pictures. I wasn’t sure how many I would end up with but I figured it would quite a few, so I found a layout I liked that already included 9 pictures. I have a set of layered templates from DigitalScrapper.com that are great! In fact there are 12×12 pages as well as 8 1/2 x 11 layered templates! They are called Scrap It Now, so you may want to check them out. They are grouped into sets depending on how many photos you want to use, so it makes it easy to find one to use.  (I receive no compensation for mentioning this product!)

Okay, I’ll stop here and admit I should have decided on how many pictures I was going to use before I selected the template, but I didn’t! I had to add 2 more frames, plus you’ll see I actually used one my photos as the top of the background! It seemed perfect for the overall theme of the page, and really was going to be too small if I used it in one of the frames.

There are so many pictures on the page that I didn’t want to use too many other embellishments on the page because I felt it would become too busy. After the page is printed, I’ll hand write names near the pictures or add any other small journaling very close to the edges of the photos.

If you have any questions be sure to let me know! Come back tomorrow to see a great way to get a double page layout (paper) ready for Halloween and get your pictures on it right away!

Fall Festivities at the Pumpkin Patch

Posted on by
2

The colors and activities of fall are always so wonderful to capture! I feel blessed to live where there are seasonal changes that allow us to capture great outdoor pictures with vibrant hues of yellows, oranges, and reds! This past weekend we went out to Pinehaven Farm to enjoy their fall activities and go out to their pumpkin patch to pick pumpkins!

We had two of our daughters, and their daughters, Princess 1 (14 years old) and Princess 2 (five), with us. The girls decorated small pumpkins as pirates and cats with little sets of adhesive foam cutouts. What a great idea to decorate with stick-ons so that your little pumpkins will last till Halloween and not deteriorate by carving too soon.

A farm has to have animals to be complete, right? Their animals seem like a combination of “regular” farm animals and a zoo. There were miniature horses, (I think I would own one if I was in the country again!) goats with the cutest babies, emus, yaks, sheep, geese, a llama, peacocks….. I don’t even remember what else! Princess 2 was always in a rush to see the next animals before the rest of us were ever finished looking at the ones we were standing in front of.

We rode tractor pulled wagons out the pumpkin patch. Princess 2 barely got off the wagon and found her perfect pumpkin before everyone had even gotten off the wagon. In fact she had to wait for everyone to get off the wagon before racing back up the steps.  She set her pumpkin on her seat and got back down to find another one. We all had fun looking at different shapes and sizes and picking out some other pumpkins. There was some surprise as to how prickly the stems and vines still on the ground were. I heard “Ouch!” more than once.  When we got back to the wagon, Princess 2 spread her arms out, looking around saying, “My pumpkin is gone!” With years of experience under our belts, we braced ourselves to deal with what could be devastation. What were we thinking? She jumped back off the wagon and found another perfect pumpkin just steps away, and quickly climbed back up the steps to take her seat on the wagon. Whew… it’s so nice to have people with a pleasant attitudes!