Of all the styles of scrapbooking, Shabby Chic is the one I use the least. I love flowers and butterflies and lace, but it is easy to inadvertently take the focus off of the featured photo when it has to compete with an over abundance of embellishments.
When I was assigned this scrapbooking sketch on Let's Scrap, I thought of a beautiful photograph of my niece, Maria, taken by my son, Attila. The photo was taken as Maria was about to take her wedding vows with the love of her life, Sendil. Her wedding was colorful, joyous, and utterly delightful, filled with details that were impressively en point with current trends. I wanted to give the Shabby Chic design of the sketch a more modern feel that would better represent Maria's style.
Maria was a beautiful bride and especially lovely in this photo, with the glow of the sun accenting the attractive silhouette of her face and illuminating her veil. I decided to crop it as an oval, instead of a circle, as suggested by the sketch, to include as much of the dress as possible.
I chose a paper by Webster's Pages from their Lullaby Lane collection, called "Out for a Stroll," because it had a "built-in" oval frame and I loved the soft blue background color, as well as the bright posies, which reminded me of Maria's colorful wedding.
As gorgeous as this paper is, it unfortunately also has a graphic of a baby carriage, which would need to be eliminated. How lucky that I had two sheets of this exquisite paper, so I could use one to cut clusters of flowers from to cover up the carriage.
I also had some lovely paper flowers in my stash that would work well in the layering I had planned.
The art of "fussy cutting" is well-named... It certainly is fussy, and it takes a lot of patience, but the result is well worth the trouble. After cutting out the flower clusters with sharp precision scissors, I inked the edges to give them more depth & I added extra dimension by popping them up with foam strips & squares.
This is a good time to mention that the birdcage image I used was cut out of a free download & I loved the way it tucked into the oval photo. I added the flourishes with acrylic stamps and pretty mustard-colored chalk ink.
When stamping, it is best to tap the ink onto the stamp instead of pressing the stamp into the ink pad.
The colorful butterflies were fussy-cut from a K & Company border strip.
I received a pack of beautiful paper lace for Christmas from my son, Tyler and his Gigi, that was perfect to add as an accent strip.
And I kept adding paper flowers until I got the 3-D effects I wanted on two corners of the layout. I also propped up one of the butterflies with pop dots & bent the wings slightly for extra dimension.
I stamped on a journaling block, but didn't want the entire stamp to show, so I stamped it by placing scrap paper on the bottom half, under the layout...love the look!
Here are some of the lovely 3-D effects that I was able to achieve with my fussy cutting and my artful layering:
And here's the finished product, which I titled "Splendor"...what we all felt as Maria and Sendil exchanged their vows with such joy and exhuberance.
I managed to give the "Shabby Chic"-style sketch a modern flair with my layout and gave this lovely photo of Maria the place of honor it deserves.
Happy New Year, dear friends...don't be afraid to add a little dimension to your pages...it's worth the effort.
Passing the love, Enikö
