I hope you guys had fun with the Jes­sica Sprague blog hop. The response was unbe­liev­able, with peo­ple from all over the world com­ing to play along! I sure had super fun

On fri­day, I hosted my first ever Speed Scrap and it was a totally fun new expe­ri­ence. In the speed scrap, I give a new instruc­tion every ten min­utes, and by fol­low­ing those instruc­tions, by the end of the hour you would have com­pleted a lay­out. I played along too, and this is the lay­out I made,

This is a title I have used before, but its so sweet I just had to reuse it. Very sim­ple color palette, and very sim­ple lay­out. I used the new papers from Echo parks’ Dots and stripes col­lec­tion (candy shoppe col­lec­tion) and love how this lay­out turned out!

In case you are curi­ous, here is what my speed scrap looked like:

“* I will post a new instruc­tion every 10 min­utes for the first hour for a total of 7 dif­fer­ent “rules” for you to fol­low in cre­at­ing your lay­out — I will update the very first post in this thread (that’s right here) with each of the instruc­tions, as well as add them into the thread as we go along. If you miss a step you can always go back to the first post to see all of the instruc­tions in one place.
* At the end of the hour, when all instruc­tions have been given, you will then have an addi­tional hour (with a 15 minute grace period for upload time) to com­plete, save, and upload your LO to the Speed Scrap Gallery.
* After you upload your LO to the Speed Scrap Gallery make sure to come back to this thread to let me know you’ve posted your lay­out … that’s how I will know who to PM the spe­cial link to in order to grab your free­bie.
*F5 on a PC will refresh the thread so you can see each new set of instruc­tions . (Com­mand R on a Mac.)

And here is a sneak peek at the free­bie you will receive if you com­plete this challenge,

Okay every­body, lets begin this speed scrap!!

Step 1: Choose your photo.

This is going to be easy. I want you to choose just 1 pho­to­graph today. Not more than that. And it does not have to be a large sized photo. This could be a photo that you took with your cell phone, and isn’t of the best qual­ity– but the photo is too cute and you don’t want to for­get about it.
Feel free to choose any theme pho­to­graph here.

Step 2: Choose 3 pat­terned papers.

You can crop your pho­to­graph– make it a square, or cir­cle shaped. Or if you pre­fer you can leave it as a rec­tan­gle itself. That will work too.
Once you are done crop­ping, choose 3 dif­fer­ent pat­terned papers that co-ordinate with your photograph.

Step 3: Lets form a grid.

Crop your pat­terned papers to match your pho­to­graph. Now you have 3 pat­terned paper cir­cles (or squares or rec­tan­gles) and a pho­to­graph. Let’s arrange these to form a grid. Once your grid is formed choose where on your lay­out you want to place this grid.
Am attach­ing a pic­ture of what kind of grid I am think­ing of…

Step 4: Choose your back­ground:
Make your back­ground a solid color or choose another pat­terned paper if you want to. I am using a solid rounded rec­tan­gle with a thin stroke.

Step 5: Add a bold title.
Add a bold title some­where around the grid. You can use a phrase as a title, and make just one word of the phrase bold and large. You can add your title with fonts, or alphas or any­thing of your choice.

Step 6: Add your embell­ish­ments:
Add your embell­ish­ments in threes. Choose any­thing here– but­tons, brads, sta­ples, bor­ders, cir­cles, stars. Just make sure that this embell­ish­ment repeats thrice on the layout.

Step 7: Add your jour­nal­ing:
Add jour­nal­ing beneath your title. Or around the grid. Try to clus­ter every­thing near the grid– the embel­lies, the title and the jour­nal­ing . This way the lay­out will have more white space and your eye will nat­u­rally be drawn to the pho­tographs and paper.

That’s it! You have another hour and 15 minute grace period (11:15 EST) to com­plete your lay­out. Upload your lay­out to today’s Speed Scrap Gallery and please come back to this forum thread to let me know you com­pleted the chal­lenge, so I can PM you with a link for your free­bie. Thanks so much for play­ing with me today!”

Thanks for stop­ping by my blog today! Happy Mon­day to you all

PS: One of my dig­i­tal lay­outs is being fea­tured on the Cre­ate blog today here!