Mel has a beautiful 'homespun' style - lots of stitching and fabric and ribbon wherever she can. She also has a knack of scrapping the little things, the homey cosy family things, that will one day be the foundation of her children's childhood memories.
Nic F on Mel:
The main thing I can say about scrapping Mel's style is it was FUN! I love how Mel's layouts are relaxed in how they're put together - it always looks like she enjoyed making them. I love the deliberately mismatched edges and little touches she uses like a tiny piece of stapled ribbon, or a little arrow, or a little ink or paint.
While Mel and I have a lot of similarities in how we scrap, I was amazed at how many differences we had too. We both love to sand and distress and both of us use pinking sheers a lot for edges, and we both hand and machine stitch a lot but I think our similarities finish there. She uses lots of little touches I forget about sometimes like corner rounding and torn edges and staples. I also love her gorgeous use of colour.
Thanks Mel, I thoroughly enjoyed not only scrapping your beautiful Bella, but also studying your style!
Caz on Mel:
A few words come to mind when I think of Mel and scrapping, one is ‘tea-towel’ another is my daughters fav word at the moment – ‘random’, but the word that comes to mind the most is ‘fun’. Mel always looks like she has had fun scrapping each and every one of her layouts.
All of Mel’s layouts seemed so different to me, so I looked closely and wrote down some things that I found popping up in her layouts.
- Stitching is one,
- Ribbon, fabric and felt are her signature ‘things’
- Blocks of patterned paper
- Scenic Route chipboard
- Buttons
- And little bits of rub-ons and cuteness.
So here is my take of a Mel layout -
- Papers that I wouldn’t normally have used.
- Ribbon and Felt
- A cute little house cut from the patterned paper
- Sewing that’s isn’t in a straight line
- And no measuring at all. yay!
And I admit, that after being worried that I couldn’t do it, I had a lot of fun and really love the final result.
Thanks Mel, for the lovely photo of Bella and the inspiration to relax when I scrap.
Mel on Mel:
This challenge scared me a little actually. I've never really considered myself having a particular 'style' as such so I took a look back through my latest scrapbook albums and realised that although the layouts are all very different I do have certain elements that show through from page to page. I tend to use my corner rounder quite a bit to soften the edges of patterned paper and the majority of layouts feature a little hand or machine stitching.
One of my little obsessions that I've had for quite a while (okay, over 6 months now) is using Scenic Route chipboard for the title in either the red or black - I do love the chunky style font that they offer.
Mel on Nic and Caz:
99% of the time I add journalling and this is either hand written or added in strips. What I loved about seeing Nic and Caz's take on the photo of Bella was that they both picked up on several of these aspects and included them in their pages. It's really quite flattering and exciting to see one of your photos scrapped by somebody else and I think both of the girls did an awesome job of this.
When I first saw Nic's layout I was shocked...I could have actually scrapped that myself - so spot on it wasn't funny with her use of Scenic Route chipboard, rounded edges, strip journalling and stitching.
Caz's take on my photo is pretty cool too, red patterned paper, stitching, strip journalling, cute little accents and something which I really loved was the chunky red corner that Caz added to the photo - I do tend to add quite a few of those to my pages now and then.
So, thank you girls for having a play with my photo - as it turned out it wasn't so scary after all!
