The Scrappy Jedi: scrapbook generation sketch hop

There are two releases in the scrapbooking world each month that I make sure not to miss- the exclusive tag kits from Elle's Studio, and the sketch downloads from Scrapbook Generation. I absolutely love Allison's sketches, so when I saw that the next quarterly Scrapbook Generation sketch blog hop was going on today, I decided to jump in and participate!

If this is your first stop on the hop and you'd like to start at the beginning, then you'll want to head over to the Scrapbook Generation blog. I've also included a list of all of the blogs in the hop at the bottom of this post.

I chose a two-page sketch from the February 2013 release to work with, and it's actually one of a trio of sketches that are included as part of a set. My papers and embellishments are almost all from either Crate Paper's Bundled Up collection and October Afternoon's Silent Night line, and I loved the way the two collections worked together in this layout.

Supplies:

InLinkz.com

Deciding to go with a Christmas theme for this layout was easy since my desk is already totally covered up with Christmas product from working on my Journal Your Christmas album...plus two others. Instead of cleaning up the mess that you see in the photo below, I just rolled with it and put some of that product to use on a layout.

I started off by looking through my binders of photos that I keep printed and ready to scrap. Scrapbook Generation sketches use lots of 4x6 photos, and while I've been scrapping mostly smaller pictures for the last few years I do keep 4x6s printed to use in divided page protectors. It only took about a minute to locate this set from our Christmas snow in 2010, and then I started looking for a sketch that would work for them.

Choosing already-printed (and sized!) photos first and a sketch second is quite different from the way that I used to work with sketches, and it really helped me to adapt Allison's design to my own style. The original sketch included two 4x6 vertical photos and four horizontal, and I swapped out one picture in each orientation for one or more smaller photos.

I keep all of my sketch downloads in a folder in my DropBox account, so they're automatically synced between my desktop and laptop computers as well as my iPad and iPhone. That made it super easy to pull up the sketch on my iPad before propping it up on my scrap table and getting to work.

I started off with a white cardstock background- my go-to when I'm starting a page and not sure which direction to take it in- but the white paper blended a bit too much with the white snow, so I tried out a cream background with a mix of patterned paper and cardstock instead.

That wasn't really thrilling me, either, especially with the busy sheet music paper on one side. I had hoped that it would fade into the background when the photos were placed on it, but that just wasn't happening, plus I had still more patterned paper to add. I could tell that this layout was going to get really crazy, really fast if I didn't tone it down, so I swapped in another old standby for a background color- kraft.

There's something that I just love about a kraft background and brightly colored papers- especially Christmas patterns. The darker tone of kraft helps ground the layout and really makes the colors pop!

When I finished my layout and photographed each page individually, it struck me that the two sides each really could function as single-page layouts on their own, especially if I were to add journaling to the left side. I think that's because of some of the changes I made to the sketch to fit my own style, including:

Using two 4x3 horizontal photos in on of the vertical photo spots on the left-hand page.
Swapping one of the 4x6 photos on the right side for a patterned paper block + small photo.
Moving the embellishment cluster from the center of the photo block on the right down and incorporating it with the small photo.
Adding even more embellishment under the paper block on the right-hand page.
Leaving out the paper strips on the right side of the page and adding my journaling in that spot, instead of in the center of the photos as shown in the sketch.