Hi everyone Noreen Smith once again playing with Creative Memories!

Happy to be back on the Creative Scrapbooker Magazine blog today sharing a couple of layouts made with Creative Memories’ new Slice of Summer seasonal products! As soon as I saw the papers, stickers and variety mat pack for this collection I knew it would work for lots of fun summer photos.For the first layout I chose several photos of my family at the beach last year in Osoyoos, British Columbia. The photos are not the best, as the sun was behind my sons as they stood in the lake, but I wanted to use them to remember the lovely, relaxing holiday that we had. I figured that cropping them down would help, so I chose the best photo to leave as the largest (4” x 4”), then trimmed down the supporting photos to 3” x 3”. I matted all the photos on white to make them stand out against the simple background shapes I created from the bright, fun papers. To finish the layout I added stickers and casual journaling written on hand drawn lines with my Black Dual-Tip Pen.

When I use white cardstock as a base for a layout, I like to create some kind of border to delineate the edges. I don’t usually sew on my layouts, but sometimes I’ll draw a border, made a faux stitching border or, create an embossed or debossed edge, which I did on both my layouts today. I simply placed the piece of blank cardstock in my 12” Straight Trimmer, lining up the edge at ¼”. Then I ran the sturdy point of my Multi-Purpose Tool down along the cutting track to leave a recessed line. For the above layout I left the recessed line (debossed) showing, and for the layout below I flipped the paper over so the line would be raised (embossed). Either way, it just adds a subtle bit of dimension and depth to an otherwise plain white page.

My second layout is based on the wonderful July Sketchy Challenge sketch by Kerry Engel.

I create a lot of sketches to use and share with my customers and other CM advisors, but sometimes I need a jumping off point, too! I loved that Kerry’s sketch this month has lots of shapes that can be pieces of paper, photos or journaling spots. I chose a few photos of my boys eating their favorite cool treats and paired it with more Slice of Summer papers, stickers and pre-made mats.

Have you ever done a layout based on a sketch from the CSM Sketchy Challenge and uploaded your layout to the Sketchy Gallery? If not, give it a try! There are lots of great layouts to get inspiration from and it’s fun to see your own layout in an online gallery!

All Creative Memories products featured in this layout are available in Canada on my CM website, and you can also find advisors in the US and other countries by using the Advisor Lookup feature.

Please drop by my Blog, Facebook Group, YouTube Channel, or my Instagram feed for more ideas and inspiration – I create monthly layout and card sketches, and showcase new Creative Memories products & tools on a regular basis.
And if you live in the Calgary, Alberta area, I invite you to join me soon for a Crop, Workshop or Weekend Retreat and enjoy some scrappy fellowship!

Thanks so much to Creative Scrapbooker Magazine for having me today…Happy Scrapping!
Noreen

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