Cool Home Design | House Ideas | Holiday Home Setting

One of the reasons I love this hobby of papercrafting is no one knows what you really intended to do.  This layout is a great example.  I started out with this cool circle paper from American Crafts.  I loved the colors and they fit my photos.  I knew I wanted to create a shopping bag and have my photos spilling out of it on tags.  Yet the paper was just too busy as a background so I started cutting and cutting... and cutting.  The short version is I was left with too short an amount of the paper to even get a border going all the way across the page!  That's when I improvised the idea of splitting the border with the circle element.   It's still a busy page, but no one really saw it the way it was before as I was assembling it.  If I hadn't told you, you would never know the border being in two pieces was really a way to fix a big mistake.  This just proves...

• As I've already confessed, I had to stretch the designer paper to get this border by cutting it and adding the circle element.  The center is a chipboard circle I painted with various shades of yellow and orange until I got something that worked.  I used Creative Memories circle cutters to cut the edges of the DSP around the circle element.
• American Crafts DSP has a solid back that coordinates and it was a great blessing to this layout for the background and some of the elements.
• The tags were cut with the Cricut and Tags, Bags, Boxes and More cartridge.  I printed the photos on matte paper and then pasted them on the tags.
• The Kraft bag is cut with decorative scissors along the top edge and then just scored and folded.  It has 1/4" deep sides.  The handle is cut from a real shopping bag.
• The 'tissue' is scrap cardstock.  I soaked each piece in water briefly, crumpled them up wet in my hands and then laid flat to dry.  None of these papers had an ink run but I've had that happen before so be careful of handling wet paper or you can end up with a lot of dye on your hands.
• Another fix for this page was the yellow strip at the top.  I got the whole thing a little too high on the page so I just cut off some of the bottom and added a contrasting strip to the top.