Masculine Week at Pink Paislee

Hey everyone, I'm here with you sharing a project completed as part of Masculine week on the Pink Paislee blog. I decided to create a layout using the new release patriotic collection, ‘Sweet Freedom’.

I live in a household with two males: my hubby and 2 year old son, so I find that as a scrapbooker I am always looking at themed or more feminine style collections and how I might create masculine layouts using them. When viewing the ‘Sweet Freedom’ collection I knew this would bring me some challenges using it as I reside in Australia not the USA. However, this collection provides lots of opportunities to create both feminine and masculine pages without having that patriotic theme as the focus. Today I am going to show you one pattern and colour combination you could use from the collection to create a masculine layout.

Here is the layout I created: Forever Young

See how designer Raquel thinks outside the box today and creates a masculine layout using our new patriotic collection 'Sweet Freedom' @raquelLbowman @pinkpaislee #pinkpaislee #12x12 #layout #masculine #ppsweetfreedom

My son is the subject of this layout. This photo was taken late last year and at the time he was beginning to do more and more things that were ‘grown up’. He began showing greater interest in attending our weekly playgroup, to the point of getting his own drink bottle and wanting to pack his own snack in his backpack (which he is wearing in this photo). Sometimes I just want time to slow down so I can enjoy each and every moment with my kiddies. I think that is why I appreciate this craft of memory keeping so much. I can record those little everyday moments that show where he was in his actions and personality at that time that can be looked back on in the future.

When creating a masculine page from a themed collection, I tend to sort though my papers first to find a combination that I think would work really well on a page. For this layout I chose to begin with a white piece of American Crafts cardstock, and then the scheme of blue, navy, and pops of copper from the ‘Sweet Freedom’ collection.

A tip when creating a masculine page is to go for a geometric page design; circles, stars, triangles, or even grid designs. This is the approach I took for my page design today. I began by cutting a large star cut file on the white cardstock and backed it with the geometric blue patterned paper. This gave me a shape to work around as well as creating a nice feature on the page.

The star dimensional stickers were a nice touch to this layout as they add a nice detail and worked with the colour scheme I had drawn from the papers. Being dimensional stickers they of course create a raised effect. I decided to scatter them in a diagonal across the page, at the top left of the photo and bottom right.

When deciding on my photo placement, the actual photo and how it is composed came into play. The photo had a lot of negative space to the right and my son is on the left side and looking towards the right. This made me choose to place it on the left side of the page. I also matted the photo with a soft grey stripe patterned paper and that gorgeous copper foil star specialty paper.

To further embellish the page I used any coordinating die cut ephemera that I thought may work on the page, like the stars, and more blank pieces like labels. A little tip for you is that if you like the washi designs but do not like committing to their placement (thats me!) then you can do what I did and place one of the washi pieces onto some plain vellum and fussy cut around it. This gave me a non adhesive die cut that is translucent like the washi is originally that I can move freely around the page.

I found the ephemera piece that had the forever young sentiment on it and thought that was perfect for the journaling that I wanted to convey. I layered that with some of the other ephemera pieces and added some typewritten journaling to add my story.