Love Love Love Us

Scrapbook Layout  - Love Love Love Us -

The beauty of a long weekend is that there is extra time in the day to craft, in my case to scrapboook.  I chose this picture of my husband and I for the layout. Since it is all about us on Valentine's Day, I continued using Crate Paper's Hello Love collection for inspiration on colors to use.

To build the heart, i used the Half Heart Cutfile from The Cut Shoppe.  I manipulated the file so that only had one big heart to deal with.  Once I blew it up to fit into a 11x11 inch margin, i chose to cut just one side of the heart and perforate the other half  of it.  At the same time, i cut the words LOVE.. using another The Cut Shoppe cut file called Love Struck.  I made sure that the word fit within the heart's half.

The cut file has three words stacked.  In order to fit them into the
heart, i had to use the left over cut out piece to pick the angles for the cut.

The perforations in the heart make it easy to hand stitch the perimeter.  I used white embroidery thread to create mark the margin of the file.  Also, I added a thin  layer of gesso to the word cut out -since in my original plan they were going to be color with gouache-

A close up of the stitching and word cut out.

I wanted to keep my focus on the large heart,  so i used a bit of gold shimmer paste on the top and bottom border of the layout.  I simply used a palette knife to drag the paste in an inward motion from the edge.  Though it is not visible through the pictures, it adds a sheen to the layout in person.

I only used the paste in small amounts and dragged the knife with some
pressure to stretch the paste along the edge.

To create the other side of the heart, i used the geometric patterned paper from the same paper collection.  I cut around the triangles, and used an ink dabber to mark the edges of each triangle.  Using  a pencil, and the cut-out, the perimeter of the cut half heart was drawn onto a simple piece of 12x12 white paper.  The triangles were then glued within a half inch outside of the marked perimeter.  The cut out was  then attached using foam dots, so that there was a contrast in height in the layout.

I use all foam letters (from my local dollar store) when attaching
larger pieces of paper.  

The picture chosen was printed in sepia tone, since the background layout was busy, all it needed was to be matted on white card stock.  I wanted to pop the picture, so i placed it at the bottom of the cut half of the heart, making sure the width span between the stitched half and the cut edge.  A few pieces of ephemera were enough to complete the piece.  The word cut-out was part of the title, the other part was the word US.  I used large chipboard letters (from my dollar store) for this.  First I gesso them, after i added a layer of gold gelatos, and finally added pink glitter -to match the colors of  the triangles-.

A few tags and ephemera was enough to highlight the picture.

To add a bit of balance to the cut part of the heart,  a few cut outs and ephemera was added using foam dots.  This adds dimension to the piece, and balances the cut-out half of the page.

I fuzzy cut some of the collection's paper to create the decoration for the layout.

Once it was all attached, I debated over adding the journal lines to the page.  A white heart was added to the bottom left corner along with a cut-out heart and a few gel dots.  

I love this layout because of the different layers and dimension on the page, but mostly for the picture of my husband and I.  I hope you like it... See you soon..

The completed layout

Materials Used:

• Patterned papers, Hello Love Collection, Crate Paper
• Cut File -heart-, Half Heart, The Cut Shoppe
• Cut File -words-, Love Struck, The Cut Shoppe
• Ephemera -banner, button-,  Heidi Swapp MInc collection
• Ephemera -tags-, Hello Love, Crate Paper
• Stickers - arrow-, Soft Spoken collection, Me And My Big Ideas
• Chipboard sticker -heart-,  Family Stories,  Simple Stories
• Gold Shimmer Paste, Heidi Swapp collection