Holiday Tradition: A Layout in Pastel Colours

With my first post of 2015, I wish you all a very Happy New Year!

Before turning to New Year's plans, I have another Christmas holiday themed layout to share today! This was a quick one to make and I aimed towards a more clean & simple style than I usually do.



I was inspired by three challenges:
First, the Finnish online magazine Paperilla, had Pastel Coloured Chrismas as their December Scrapbooking Challenge.

Secondly, at Challenge YOUrself, the December prompt was to depict Traditions. Board games are a lovely winter favorite and a Christmas holiday tradition in my family. With lots of family staying overnight, it’s easy to spend half of the night playing! In Challenge YOUrself, you must always include a photo of YOU. This photo is from Christmas 2006 and I'm the one in the middle holding cards, with my sister on the right and my then boyfriend, now husband, on the left.

And thirdly, at CSI - Color, Stories, Inspiration there was a special Scrap365 Case File:


I printed the photo two times and digitally altered one of them to a monochromatic pale green shade. I cut out us people in the monochromatic photo and only the game board from the coloured photo, so that it pops out nicely.

The game is the super fun and exciting Ticket to Ride, where you compete in building rail roads across North America. New York to Los Angeles and Montréal to Vancouver, here we go! I highly recommend it to everyone who likes board games.



After I fussy cut the photo, I realized I had black tags that went very well with the photo size-wise. I started with journaling, which is completely contrary to how I usually do. Often I leave it till last and don't always have as much space left as I would like to. Doing it this way worked well, and the rest of the layout fell in place easily.

For the title, I wanted to use these coral pink very large puffy alpha. I had to find a place for that next - as you can see, Finnish language has some very long words! I knew there was not going to be much space for other embellishments, and for the final touch, I just did a bit of stamping and some drops of mist.



My Evidence for the CSI Challenge are: tags, puffy stickers, cursive font, chalk/chalkboard and something powdery (salmon and green chalk inks). And as for Testimony, I documented a winter favorite (board games) and did it by handwriting on tags.



I’m quite happy with this layout and realize once again that fussy cutting the silhouettes out and printing the photo in monohchromatic shades can really upgrade an otherwise mediocre and photo. I'm posting the original photo so that you can see what a difference it makes. This was really quite ugly to begin with, and would have been uninspiring to scrap, with the busy background and bad colours to name but a few things. I'm really glad I thought of editing it a bit more, because I don't have a good quality photo of every memory and theme that I want to scrap. Especially if the photos date back to before I started scrapbooking, like this one!



I also managed to get closer to Clean & Simple style than I usually do, and it’s something I’ve been wanting to try. Happy New Year to you all!