Guest Star Debbie Hodge!

Hi, I’m Debbie Hodge. I live in a small town in New Hampshire and take a lot of outdoor photos. I love layering and mixing patterned papers, and these Jenni Bowlin papers are great for the photos recently taken at my parents’ farm. On “Moment” I used one of my favorite techniques for layering a variety of patterned papers. I double matted the two pieces that back up my photos. My preference is to use a very narrow black mat and then a slightly wider white mat as I’ve done here. I like the definition this gives to a patterned piece when it’s layered right on top of another pattern. You could also get this definition with an inked edge or stitching.

I rarely make layouts with one photo. The design on “Hayride” is one I turn to frequently when I want to get several photos on the page. Three 5 x 3.5” landscape photos are accented by three smaller, supporting photos. Since the photos contain so many different colors, I desaturated the smaller photos just a bit. When designing layouts with several photos, I make sure to crop my photos using “repetitions with variety.” Here, the three larger photos are all the same size and orientation (repetition). The supporting photos are smaller (variety), with the two on the right of the same size (repetition). Note, also, that two of the smaller photos are of portrait orientation (variety). You can download the page sketch with measurements (as well as two complementary designs) for “Hayride” at my website Get It Scrapped!

Debbie Hodge is the author of the Memory Maker’s book, Get It Scrapped!, and the owner of a website with that very same name. You can find new articles and tutorials on both the practical and creative aspects of memory keeping by Debbie and the Get It Scrapped! teachers several times each week. Debbie also hosts a monthly design series at Masterful Scrapbook Design with Jenni Bowlin Studio designers Doris Sander, Lisa Dickinson, and Dina Wakley teaching this fall.