One of the easiest ways to get scrapbooking quickly, is to use sketches. The design work has been done for you. All you have to do is choose what you are going to use.
The 30 Days of Sketches hosted by Christies Beautiful Life is something that I like to try and participate in. I love all the different sketches for the variety and the ones that truly challenge me because they aren't my normal style or they use a lot of mixed media, which I still very much have my L plates on with.
The Month of March sees us doing Series 20. And this is the sketch for Day One and my layout using it.
I pretty much kept to the sketch with just a few minor adjustments. Instead of the tag to the right, I used a index card as my heading in that spot.
I moved the subheading to above the photos.
I created a space for my journaling at the bottom left and placed a label above it for the place and date. On the sketch, it looked like the vertical strips of paper had stitching on their edges. I was too lazy to do actual stitching, and the stamp set I used to have of stitching, I seem to have misplaced. So I just used a marker to draw doodly like lines. I think it works and looks effective.
But sketches can also sometimes be a sticking point. It's a challenge sometimes to look beyond the exact sketch and be able to change and tweak it. That's where something like the 30 Days of Sketches with Christies Beautiful Life is a life saver.
Not only do you get 30 wonderful sketches to start you off, but you also get a wonderful array of sketch interpretations. There are a heap of people who take the sketches and recreate their own layouts. Some look very much like the sketch, others not so much.
You can see my process video below, and if you watch it on YouTube, be sure to check out the playlist in the description box of the video. There you will see loads of different interpretations of each sketch.
I hope I have inspired you to grab a sketch and get playing. You can use the one sketch over and over, and each time your end result will be different.
A regular challenge I like to participate in is the Iron Crafters Challenge. With a new mystery product to include on our layouts each month, it gets me deep diving into my stash.
The mystery item for February is acrylic pieces - titles and such.
Well these are basically non existent in Australia. I never see them in any scrapbook store. So generally when they are called for, I have to substitute for something else. Sure, I can get them from overseas, but the postage just isn't worth it unfortanately.
BUT this month I didn't have to substitute as I remembered that I got a free acrylic title with a kit I bought from Color Rush Studios. This was the layout I made using my one and only acrylic title...lol
I love the simplicity of this layout. The square on square layered design is on of my favourites. It is so easy to do and very effetcive. You can gut the middle of the papers too to save on paper, but I'm too lazy to do that. Plus I have sooo much paper and trying to use it up. As I approach 60 I feel the need to downsize my stash not keep it....lol
The embellishments for this layout are a mixed bag. Some are from the Color Rush Studio kit and some are from my colour boxes.
The nutcracker, the three trees, the car and bundle of presents are from the kit, the rest are from my green colour box. What is my green colour box? I have a box assigned to each colour, and when I am finished with a project, the left over embellishments sometimes end up in their appropriate colour box. This normally happens when I have stamped or die cut something, or when I only have a few left from a packets or am just too lazy to put them back in the collection from where I got them...lol
I use these boxes a lot. They are especially handy when I am not using a collection pack or kit to make a layout. Sometimes I will just start a layout with patterned paper and the photos ,and that's when the colour boxes come into their own for finding items to add to a page. Many times the layout goes in a completely different direction to what I first anticipated purely because of the things I find in my colour boxes.
As I have mentioned before, the collection I used was from Color Rush Studios. And yes I did get it from the USA and paid the expensive shipping for it. But I fell in love with it and it was nutcracker themed. I love nutcrackers! They didn't ship to Australia at the time it was released, so I contacted them. They went out of their way to add overseas shipping to their offerings, so how could I not buy it after that!
I do love their acrylic items in their store, but again the shipping....uggh. Maybe I should look into making some myself. I know what I need to do it, just need to determine the demand I guess.
If you are in Australia, would you buy acrylic titles and embellishments made here?
If you don't follow me on YouTube, here is the process video to watch.
Do you ever not scrap because you are time poor? Well let me tell you a little trick.
Use base pages! They make for quick pages that anyone can find the time to do.
I used a premade base page to create this layout for the latest Paw Your Way Into Our Hearts hop.
There are so many ways you can make base pages. Here are just a few :-
Follow a sketch
Use scraps.
Use PL cards.
Recreate a favourite layout.
Or just wing it!
I have lots of videos on my YouTube channel about Base Pages. I have collated them all in a playlist here.
For this layout I started with a base page made from Project Life (PL) cards. I just haven't taken to the whole PL or pocket page style of scrapbooking, but I have a million of these cards in my stash. So what better way to use a few at once than by making a base page from them.
Then to complete the layout, it is as simple as selecting your photos and embellishments. Easy peasy!
And talking embellishments, they don't always have to match the theme of the photos. Sure it is nice when you do have things that coordinate, but as you can see on my layout, I had one dog themed embellishment.
When you don't have coordinating embellishments that is when you can fall back on the basics. Cameras and arrows never go astray in these situations. If your photos are outdoors, then you can always include trees, leaves, flowers etc. Always look for the less obvious embellishments too, like my magnifying glass with the word explore on it. I'm sure when the designer made this one they were probably thinking holidays, trekking, things like that. But I made it work on this page as my dog was exploring a new walking area.
Another great embellishment that never looks out of place are words. Just make sure to not overwhelm the page with them, unless that's the look you are going for.
I love how quickly this page came together, and that's thanks to the design work basically being done already by utilising a base page.
Make sure to check out the process video too.
Thanks for dropping by.
If you have any questions, please leave me a comment.
This year is turning out to be the year I rejoin all the challenges....lol
The latest one I have joined is How To Kill a Kit With Style where you create your own kit and make as many layouts as you can from it. In the past the prompts to make your kit were based around a product or style. But for this year the prompts are very different.
January's prompt is Personal Growth. Because the kit can be anything you like, I have decided to make my kit one I will use all year long and have paired this challenge with the 100 Patterned Paper Challenge. So my kit is just 100 pieces of paper. I think this will be a lot of fun.
So for January's prompt I chose 2 papers from the stack of 100 and created this layout.
I decided to keep it pretty simple with just using a few repeated embellishments. Those embellishments were a stamped and die cut image, a few fussy cut dragonflies and some die cut foliage.
There is quite a story around the Personal Growth component of this layout, so I encourage you to watch the video if you want to know more.
If you have any questions at all, please leave a comment below. And if you want to share what you create, then please feel free to join my new facebook community here. I would love to see what you create.
This month for Stamp & Stencil Savvy we were meant to be stamping florals. I may or may not have read the brief properly...LOL...and I stencilled florals. In my defence, it's still floral.
Here is the page and some close ups, followed by the video.
This is a fun monthly Challenge for 2026. Three times each month for 2026 there will be 3 prompts to create a scrapbook layout with.
Four our first one we had to use red paper, enamel dots and triangles. I think these challenges will be great for using the products we already have in our stash. See what I created below.
Thanks for dropping by. I hope you managed to get some scrapping done over the holidays. If you did, I would love to see it. Join my facebook group HERE and show me your wonderful creations.
Until next time, stay safe and have a scrap happy day.
