Just So Scrappy Tutorial! A Page (Can You Believe it?!)

Pigs were sighted flying in Austin, TX on Sunday, he** froze over, and Melanie Muenchinger completed a scrapbook page! The first in three years!! (my poor kids) The good news was it turned out really cute IMHO, it took less than an hour start to finish (and that includes choosing, editing and printing my photo)* and I only needed one stamp set to make it: my new "Just So Sporty", now available for purchase(BTW, the party last night was off the hook!) I know I'll be making lots of sports pages for both my boys in the future now that I have this set, but it's going to work double duty for other types of pages, like the one I'm sharing today.
My three year old William is all boy and a perpetual motion machine, he's always on the move! He also especially likes construction, the big machines that go with it, and building things with Dad in the shop. I found this adorable paper 12x12 paper by Miss Elizabeth called "Varoom!" in a pack of 6 sheets at the Dollar Tree! The other papers had planes, trains, trucks all that "boy stuff", which I'm sure you'll be seeing here soon now that I've got my scrapper hat on LOL! Since I started an 8x8 album for him as an infant that someone gave me, I decided to go ahead and cut this down for 8x8 as well. I really like this size for scrapping, it's easier for me than all the space of a 12x12, I just feel the need to fill it all up! I started choosing my DP and a photo that would work with it: William climbing on some huge Lincoln logs at Disneyworld, even though it's not as literal as a construction pic would have been, I liked the composition and colors. I created a little orange jersey for him (his favorite color) stamped on Only Orange CS, colored the sleeves with a white Koh-i Noor and added shadows with an orange one, then stamped a "3" on it, also from "Just So Sporty", to represent his age when the pic was taken.

Next I looked at the paper to give me some cues for choosing what I should play off of to create more decorative elements. I liked the rows of orange cones in the print, so I thought I could make a fun border with scissors or punching out triangles so that my orange mat underneath would peep through. Since I planned on having my shirt on the left, I decided to make the row on the bottom right to pull the eyes around the layout. Luckily I have this Fiskars Large Star Punch, perfect for the job, just slide the paper in, line up the horizontal of the side points with the bottom on the paper and punch. I thought it turned out pretty cool...**
Next I wanted to make some caution tape and sign to give it a real hazardous feel LOL! I stamped "what a" and "boy" on Yoyo Yellow CS, punched it out with my 1 1/4 " square, mounted on a black 1 3/8" square and matted again (I had to just cut around on that one) and mounted it with a dimensional. Then I lined up "I'm a" "BIG" "boy" on my block an stamped in rows on a scrap piece of Yoyo Yellow... and cut and mounted to look like it was roping off section of the page, going under at the top and over at the bottom.

I finished it off with an SU! corner punch and some Gina K Screw Brads. I hope some these ideas are useful to you and this sample allows you to see more possibilites for the "Just So Sporty" set beyond sports!

Don't forget to leave a comment here (telling me what you'd create first with the Sporty set) to win a brand new Scor-Pal and Scor-Mat! Come back tomorrow for another chance to win and see a new project I created using the Scor-Pal! Have a great day!

*unlike my usual whole weekend efforts to finish a page, which is the main reason I stopped scrapping!

**an idea I had that I think would have been fun (but I refrained from doing because I couldn't find my mini alphabet and kind of despise seeing my own writing on a page) is putting a single letter into each punched out area so the cones would spell out a name or date, I was going to put "William" but my minimalist DH said something along the lines of "quit while you're ahead!" but I give you my blessing to go for it if you like! ;)