Grateful

What are you grateful for? I'm grateful for so many things, and so many people. I am crazy blessed and love to reflect on those blessings, especially in November - with Thanksgiving on the horizon it just seems the perfect time for it. So I was thrilled to receive my American Crafts November blog assignment which was to create a layout and card with an "I'm Grateful for" theme. I chose to create the page about my mom and for my mom. You can read more about it and see my card on the American Crafts blog. I thought it would be fun though, to share a tip with you here that I like to use, and used on this layout.

I used a lot of letter stickers for my title – or journaling, it could be called either - its pretty long, right? By the way I found my awesome title on Pinterest. So how do you figure out how to arrange the words for a really long title without sticking down, pulling up and re-sticking the letter stickers until you like the results? Here is what I do. First I trace my selected letter stickers, forming the words of my title, onto something clear – like product packaging – with a Slick Writer or Sharpie.

I then trim the traced words out and arrange them on my layout. Sometimes I find that the letter stickers I've selected just won't work in the allotted space, so I select new ones and trace them. Once satisfied with the arrangement, I add the letter stickers to my page. Doing this might sound a bit extreme or time consuming, but it works for me and saves me from a lot of grief in the long run! It even saves my letter stickers...I can't tell you how many I ruined before starting to use this method...it was a lot. 

Notice the little 2" x 3" white cardstock pieces? Those are templates I cut to represent my photos. I use them when designing my layouts before printing my photos. I have quite a collection of sizes cut out that I keep in a clip at my workstation. These really help speed up the process of figuring out photo sizes and layout of them on my page! I know there are some great templates out there for purchase, but I simply made mine with some cardstock scraps. Easy and affordable!

Have you seen this bit of news yet? It's another sketch class from Kelly Purkey! I was honored to contribute a layout for Kelly's class and if you come back to my blog on Friday I'll be posting a giveaway of the class!

I hope you are having a wonderful week! Mine has been crazy busy, but what's new, right?! :) Thanks for stopping by and have a blessed week!