Hello again my friends… yup, its a two post day today… Only because I got time to sit and upload these pic­tures to my blog (finally!!)

This lay­out of mine, titled “a moth­ers love” IS my all time favorite lay­out. This is also the third scrap­book­ing lay­out I ever made. Our first daugh­ter Nidhi, was two months old, and I was so inspired to scrap­book all those cute, adorable pho­tos of her. Not to men­tion that new moth­er­hood feel­ing… Things were mov­ing so fast, I did not want to for­get any­thing, I wanted all of those mem­o­ries pre­served

So I started scrap­book­ing. I had mag­a­zines at home, and I kept flip­ping through them, and mark­ing the pages that inspired me. Thats when my hus­band came to me and said, “you need to make lay­outs that are YOU, design them your­self and not try and scraplift stuff…”

Which got me think­ing… Hmmmm.… how could I do that?

I pulled out my sketch book, and this time I looked at design books, typog­ra­phy books, books of great painters; and made about 10 sketches. Really detailed sketches. And then I started this layout…

This has to be the most planned lay­out I have ever made. At that time, my art table was in the base­ment and this lay­out took me about three weeks. It was a work in progress, and I had papers all over the place and nobody was allowed near my table for a long time… (espe­cially said husband!)

The end result, has to be like I said, the most pre­cious lay­out of mine ever… And this is page three of baby N’s first year scrap­book album now,

(click on image to see enlarged version)

I don’t know about you, but I am not an organized/planned scrap­per… I choose a bunch of pho­tos, print them, and then sit and scrap­book… I wish I would plan and size my pho­tos, so that I had some tiny pho­tos some larger ones, but I really don’t have the patience to that in advance. So most of my paper scrap­booked lay­outs have 4 by 6 photos.

(con­ver­sly, this is why I love dig­i­tal scrap­book­ing… I can chose pho­tos, resize them, scrap­book them– all at once; and most of the time within an hour)

Cou­ple of close ups of the lay­outs, (ok not a cou­ple, but lots of close ups…)

This pais­ley motifs was done using water­color paints on a water­color paper. Thats right, I used a water­color paper instead of card­stock for this layout. I drew inspi­ra­tion for my pais­ley motif, from the black top (kurta) that I am wear­ing in the pho­tographs. The embroi­dery in that top is very clas­sic and intri­cate. Since I am not such a great embroi­der, I instead used water col­ors and a felt pen to draw the motif, and high­lighted it with some thread work. I also added some leaves, that I punched out from papers.

Lots of embroi­dery on this layout…

I wanted to high­light the photo that lies beneath the title. To do this I added hand embroi­dery with beads. Doo­dled my design with a pen, and used a paper piercer to make the embroi­dery go eas­ier and quicker.

I grouped brads of the same color, but dif­fer­ent size, to cre­ate a flower. (as seen beneath the word LOVE). For some rea­son this seemed like a novel idea at that time

Oh, I for­got to men­tion, this lay­out was pub­lished and appeared in this Dec 2011 issue of Scrap­book etc. I was SO excited when I got that email!

Thanks for stop­ping by today! And if you got till here, thanks for read­ing this really long post

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