Hot Summer Layouts

With all of this heat outside, there's no place to be but indoors, working on hot, summer layouts with Scenic Route Grafton papers, chosen by June's designer of the month, Kathryn Krieger. This two page layout uses earth tones in the background, spiced up with the bold colors of the reverse side of the paper. (Double-sided paper truly does mean twice the fun!)

To keep the photos from competing too much with each other and with the design, I used Adobe Photoshop to remove the colors of five of them and applied a soft sepia filter at 60% to warm the tones. You can make this layout with any favorite six beach pics - you'll need one at 4.5x4", three at 3x 4.5", one at 3x4", and your favorite color one at 4x6". To make this work, I matted only one 3x4.5" sepia photo and popped it on the page to make it stand out even more. The color photo is framed, then popped on a 4.5x6.5"mat cut from the same paper as the other mat. Then just "scatter" your photos across your background with slight overlap to homogenize the look.

All products that create the background are from the Scenic Route Grafton line with the exception of the cardstock (Chantilly Lace) and the brads (Basic Grey Archaic). And, yes, I did rip the background paper on the right page into vertical strips and overlapped them to give the layout a little more dimension. The flowers are made from left over scraps from the title cutting (Cricut "Opposites Attract" ). The flower punch is from Marvy. And don't forget to chalk ink everything. On this layout I used Quick Quotes chalk inks (the absolute best chalk ink on the market - and my favorite), in Amaretto. There's a new supply of nearly every color under the rainbow at Scrapbooks Plus.