In the past few months, after falling in love with paper and stamps while working on my Project Life, I have ventured into paper scrapbooking, and I am hooked! I haven’t blogged any of my pages so far, but that is about to change. 🙂 Today I want to walk you through a page I made while my mom was visiting – it was a super quick page, and I had fun putting it together.

Inspiration
The inspiration for this page came from a roll of pretty trims I bought with my mom.

Isn’t it super festive?? I matched it with pictures of my mom and me putting up the tree. 🙂

Colors and cutouts
Unfortunately my mom wasn’t wearing Christmas colors in the picture 🙂 but I went with it anyway and I ended up liking the blue colors in the end. 😉 I took a class on the Silhouette at Studio Calico last month, and I wanted to include some cut outs on my page. This was my first time using and cutting POW glitter paper by American Crafts – seriously, that stuff is amazing!! The only color I had on hand was this dark charcoal, so I decided to combine it with some touches of silver.

Layout design
Being born as a digital scrapbooker, I felt most comfortable mapping out this page on the computer to decide what size to print out my photos at and figure out how big my cut outs needed to be. I decided to use the negative of a cut for my title.

Cut outs
I cut out two words/phrases from POW paper with my Silhouette. The “joy” writing is from the Silhouette store, and I love how pretty the negative is too! I will definitely be using that in my December Daily album.

Getting started
Once I printed out the photos, the first step was to choose my background paper and figure out where to stamp. I went with a white woodgrain paper because I already had plenty of color in my photos. I used some exclusive stamps from the 25 Days class at Studio Calico and another from Kelly Purkey’s Dec. Daily kit. I put the stamps on acrylic blocks and placed them on the page to get an idea of the layout. Before stamping I took a quick snapshot of the layout in case I forgot how everything was supposed to be put together after the stamping. 🙂

Stamping+embossing
As I mentioned earlier, I decided to add some touches of silver, so I stamped my stamps with clear ink and embossed in silver. (my not-so-crafty mom watched the process in awe – she was really impressed at how cool embossing is 😉 I will not mention that after I finished putting the final touches to this page she said “I don’t know where you find the patience for this, I’d have already thrown everything out!! :-))

While I was at it, I also embossed some Studio Calico wood veneer in silver – snowflakes and trees.

I pressed the wood veneer down onto the clear ink pad, sparkled the embossing powder on top and then I used a pair of tweezers to hold on the little pieces while I turned on the heat gun. Some of the pieces didn’t get good coverage at the center, but I kind of like that look too – it reminds me of icicles!

I decided not to emboss the large tree that goes with the title, because I loved the look of plain wood on top of the sparkly POW paper.

Journaling
I didn’t want to risk botching the page with the journaling, so I went the safe route – I wrote onto vellum, then cut it into strips and moved them around to find the best placement. At this point I cut out some pieces of the pretty trim and placed them on my page as well (it took a while to get it to stay straight but I figured it out! 🙂 I attached it to the back of the POW paper with washi tape). Then I adhered everything, and I attached the pieces of vellum using drops of glossy accents.

Title
I debated whether to put in the words for “tree” or just leave the wood veneer, but in the end I did add a silver glitter alpha because I wanted to add some more silver touches.

And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this tutorial!

Supply list:
woodgrain paper by LCI paper
POW paper by American Crafts
Stamps by Studio Calico and Kelly Purkey
Wonderland wood veneer by Studio Calico: snowflakes and trees
vellum paper
ZING! silver embossing powder
American Crafts slick writer black
Amy Tangerine Scene Thickers
Silhouette SD cutting machine
Foam dots
Glossy Accents (Ranger)
Canon photo paper
Trim by Living home
Versamark clear ink
Embossing heat gun
Roller date stamp K&Company
Archival Jet black ink (Ranger)