Mixing up those pattern papers!

Everyone has their "trademark" style of paper crafting...maybe you ALWAYS have ribbon on your layout, or perhaps you're a stampaholic, or you just HAVE to have stickers galore. Me? I'm a pattern paper nut, most pages I creat will have 2-3 patterns workong together. I love to mix colors, polka dots and stripes, and just play until they layer together and work well with my photos. To help in this direction, I store my papers in 2 different ways- some by theme like "vintage", "winter" and "travel". Others that don't fit into themed categories are simply sorted by color. It makes it easy when I'm, scrapping, I grap my photos and a few sheets of cardstock, and then I hit the pattern paper files, searching for anything that might coordinated.

I was excited to see the October challenge over at Scrapbookers Anonymous. This month they are looking for pages that combine 3 pattern papers, all from different manufacturers. I pulled out an old photo of my daughter and my niece (hello 2003!!)and printed it 3 times wallet size- rather than enlarge the photo, I wanted to go tiny to emphasize the "tinyness" of the 2 little girls.

Starting with the black and white polka dot paper as my background, I searched through my scraps for 2 other PPs that would work. Loved the green for something unexpected, and wanted red to go with the photo-but not TOO red. The maroon scrap was the right color I was looking for, but the pattern was too much for me. To resolve this issue, I crumpled the scrap, flattened it out, and then ran over the wrinkles with a sanding block to take the edge off! Try the challenge yourself, grab a bold pattern and a couple of scraps, and see what kind of layering you can do with the unexpected! =) T