Traci Reed: Inspired by the NON-Book Embellishments

I love a great themed collection like everyone else, but I also love the challenge of going off-theme an making a collection fit my story as I did with the Bookish Collection and this layout of a recent good day/bad day trip my husband and I took.

There are a lot of sentiments in the Bookish Collection that don't have anything to do with reading, including this journaling card I trimmed down and used as a page flip, so I pulled them all out before I started so I could access them easily when building my page.

The story is about a good day turned disaster night, but I wanted to focus mainly on the good day portion, so I only dedicated this small corner to snark because I knew it would be in the same visual area as the journaling that corresponded to it. I used chipboard, stamps, tags, and one of the fun quotes (that I edited) to set the mood and create depth.

On the non-snark photo side, I used a lot of hearts and lovey-dovey words to keep the focus where it belonged, on the sweet photos. I also added some of the watercolor rub-ons to match the journal card sentiment and bring in more of that freeform look to such a linear page.

After my layout was done, I measured the space I had on the card to add journaling, then printed it from photoshop and used scissors to cut around my cluster. It wasn't the most elegant solution, but it worked!

Lastly, I made sure to balance the clustering on the bottom with some more on the top and added more sentiments.