Adding Pizzazz to Your Titles

Titles set the stage for your page. People often ask how to title pages and what can be done to make titles more interesting than just using letters. Here are two examples of how I used the subject of the page and used techniques to add pizzazz to the titles.

My first example is a page with pictures of my nephew eating ice cream. I wanted to showcase his charming face. I chose “SWEET” as the title to reflect on the ice cream he was eating and also the look on his face. I created the title using three of my favorite tools – my Cricut, grungepaper and Glimmer Glam. Here’s how I did it.

The shape of the title came from the Cricut A Word Party™ cartridge. This is a great cartridge for titles and decoration for pages featuring children. It has ice cream cones, trains, puzzles, flowers and balloons. I originally intended to do individual cones with each letter, but this would have taken too much space. Instead I used the welding feature on my Gypsy to make all the scoops of ice cream one piece by overlapping them slightly so I have one ice cream cone with five scoops of ice cream. (If you don’t have a Gypsy, you can simply layer each scoop slightly over the preceding one and glue.) I did not weld the cone to the ice cream scoops as I planned a different surface treatment and having the cone a separate piece made this easier.

I cut the ice cream scoops and cone out of grungepaper to give them more depth. I wanted the ice cream to be white, but didn’t want to paint the grungepaper as the letter cutouts were fairly small and I was concerned that the paint might make the letters less sharp. So I cut a second set of the ice cream scoops (identical to those cut out of grungepaper) out of white paper. I glued white paper ice cream scoops to the grungepaper ones. For the glistening look of real ice cream, I painted them with Chandelier Glimmer Glam.

I creating an extra scoop in the same way to add “Payton” on the page. I embossed the name with ZING embossing powder in Chesnut. This embossing powder is available in lots of colors and creates a nice raised surface.

To make the cone look more like an ice cream cone, I ran the rough side of the cone over a Tea Dye Distress Ink pad until it achieved the right color and texture.

In my second example, I had a two-page layout with many pictures of a trip to an icebar. I wanted a simple title because the page had so many pictures so I went with the straightforward title “ Icebar.” (One of the pictures on the page includes the bar’s name so I didn’t need any details in the page’s title. I used Tim Holtz Fragments from idea-ology to make it look like the title was encased in ice, much like the Bose speaker and the fire alarm were at the bar. It didn’t pop enough with just letters so I cut the letters out of the brown and turquoise, the darkest paper used on the page. I then glued them to the green paper, which made them stand out even more. The green paper had music on it, which helped to convey the music in the bar. Then I simply applied Glossy Accents to each letter (one at a time) and pushed the Fragment on top of it until the Glossy Accents covered the entire bottom of the Fragment. When dry, I cut around the Fragment. Because they are a little heavy, I also affixed them to the page using Glossy Accents (just a little so it doesn’t come out from under the block.)

These provide a couple of examples of how when you sit down with your tools and think about what you want your title to convey you can came up with new ways of making a title special. Of course, it is hard to see the full details from the pictures. To get a better look, visit Scrapbooks-Plus. Both of these pages will be displayed on the Design Team wall until April 1, 2011 as are the many other pages created by the Design Team with the TWIG line of papers. If these pages motivate you the TWIG line of paper is available by the wall so you can pick out just what you need for your pages.