Learning from Dina Wakley

Earlier this week fellow JBS designer Dina Wakley and I were guests on a new episode of the Paperclipping Roundtable, a scrapbooking podcast.  You can just click below to listen to us discuss our process for creating a single layout from start to finish, and find this episode here on the Paperclipping website if you want to join in the comments.



Listening to Dina talk about her process made me immediately want to give some of her creative steps a try - and I wanted to try a page that mixed Dina's free-flow, artsy style with my own look, so things like stacked papers, butterflies and letter stickers.  I started with the die-cut letter stencil, after I had used it to paint letters onto a few other sheets of cardstock, so it was already soaked in pink and purple ink.  I layered that and the music print from Haven on the large dot embossed cardstock in Jenni's collection for Co'ordinations, and I was off to a start of embracing my messier side!

To try a few other things I might not do, I grabbed my favourite JBS stamp (the butterfly, of course!) and 'inked' it with a colour wash spray instead of an ink pad, and stamped it on one of the mini-pattern blocks from Red/Black Extension IV.  I love how it stamped clear enough that you can see the butterfly design, but fluid enough that it looks more like paint than a stamp.  Then I cleaned and reinked the stamp with Jenni's lavender ink pad and stamped just offset from the first design... then soaked the whole block with pearl glimmer mist for good measure!  I love the mix of shades and the shine.

This photo itself deserves a little explanation, I suppose.  It turns out I was a scrapbooker long before I knew the word scrapbooking existed.  Growing up, I was a 4-H Member (4-H! For Youth! For America! 4-H! ...I know some of you were singing that already.) and we had to keep an official 4-H record book that we turned in for assessment every year.  In it, we had to record - in our own words - what we did on any number of special projects we had highlighted as our interests.  My family have been helping me search for some childhood photos and came up with this book that includes page after page of things I wrote growing up about all my hobbies and interests, and the writing is just as funny as the pictures.  I was so overly serious as a child!  Plus although my vocabulary has matured a bit over the years, there are sentence structures I used as a tiny girl that I still use now... clearly I am a creature of habit!  So I decided to include the whole page and printed the scanned image as a 4x6 picture, which is clear enough to read easily in my album.

Behind the photo, I layered scraps of JBS papers new and old (and one extra scrap from some other project left-overs since it was a good match to the purple) and tucked in a label from the Magpie accessory sheet and some hodge podge stickers (love them!) and sprayed some pale pink mist over that whole stack of things to make it coordinate better with the alpha stencil.

To finish things, I embossed the JBS chipboard hearts with a metallic pink embossing powder - it looks either pink or purple, depending on how you look at it, so that pulled the pink and purple colours together even more.  I wanted a bit of contrast behind the hearts so added a few scraps of pink washi tape, then spelled out my title with JBS letters new and old - the tiny letters are from the bottom of the hodge podge sticker sheet!

Dina... I hope you approve of my style mash-up!

By the way, all this weekend I'm hosting an online crop on my blog - and there you can see what happened to the other piece of paper from that alphabet stencil, amongst plenty of other things! And win prizes, including JBS goodies!  I'd love for you to stop by for some scrapping fun.

Have a brilliantly crafty weekend!

Love and glitter,
Shimelle