Scrapbook & Cards Today Blog: Stretch a sketch with Aly Dosdall!

It seems whenever the fall season hits two things happen: 1) I suddenly start wanting to craft more, and 2) my schedule suddenly gets busier! Last February I showed you how I saved time by using the same sketch to come up with six different valentines, so this month I thought I would share an original sketch with you and show you how I used this sketch to create three fall projects—a layout, some place cards, and a Thanksgiving card (most of you have already celebrated Thanksgiving, but here in the U.S. we haven’t yet). Using this sketch as the base for my projects saved me lots of time since I didn’t have to come up with a new design scheme for each one.

The sketch

This sketch includes one 5 x 7 inch photo balanced by a grid of eight blocks where I’ve placed a dissected title and plenty of room for fun embellishments. If you have more than one photo you can substitute two 3 ½ x 5 inch ones, or create a 5 x 7 photo collage in a photo editing program such as Picasa.

Layout

Supplies: color core embossed cardstock (Core’dinations), patterned paper (Jillibean Soup), journaling spots (Jillibean Soup), alpha stickers (Jillibean Soup), corrugated alphas and shapes (Jillibean Soup), canvas flowers(Jillibean Soup) , buttons (Creative Café, Jillibean Soup), baker’s twine (Jillibean Soup), decorative pins (Jillibean Soup), spray ink (Tattered Angels), distress ink (Ranger), square punch (Marvy Uchida), machine stitching

For my layout I followed the sketch pretty closely. I added some zig zag machine stitching to outline my grid instead of using patterned paper. One line of my title stretches across two blocks of the grid so that I could hyphenate the word thankful correctly.

Place cards

Supplies: patterned paper (Jillibean Soup), mini alpha stickers (Jillibean Soup), twine (Jillibean Soup), ribbon (Offray), eyelets (We R Memory Keepers), foam dots (American Crafts)

Next I rotated the sketch on its side and used it to create some fall place cards.

The eight eyelets take the place of the eight blocks in the grid, the journaling card and name take the place of the photo, and the tree accent takes the place of the journaling blocks. To transform the sketch from a square to a vertical rectangle, I simply cropped the right and left sides down leaving less empty space.

Thanksgiving card

Supplies: kraft card base (Jillibean Soup), patterned paper (We R Memory Keepers), embossed stickers (We R Memory Keepers), sentiment sticker (We R Memory Keepers), twine (Jillibean Soup), button (Fancy Pants Design), square punch (Marvy Uchida), corner rounder (Creative Memories)

I focused on the right half of the sketch for my Thanksgiving card. I was inspired by the grid, and adapted it to fit my card size, and the size of my one and only square punch (1 inch). I only used six blocks for the grid on the card instead of eight, leaving space in between some of them for my sentiment. I mimicked the circle accent and three journaling strips from the left half of the sketch with my button and three leaf accents.

I hope this sketch will help save you time on your fall projects, or whatever else you may be creating currently. Enjoy, and happy fall!

~ Aly Dosdall