Bella Blvd Studio Blog: April Guest Designer: Susan Weinroth

Happy Monday everyone! Today we want to give a very warm welcome to our April Guest Designer, Susan Weinroth!

Hello Everyone, my name is Susan Weinroth and I'm super excited to be here today with some guest projects for the Bella Blog. A little about me -- I live in north Florida with my two little boys & husband (and our toy poodle!). Most of my scrapbook pages are about my boys - and include the stories & photos that I don't want to forget. I also have a family & child photography business, and my kids end up seeing ALOT of my camera pointed in their direction. Needless to say, I have a ton of photo prints piled up, and not nearly enough time to scrap them!

My usual scrapbook style is VERY color-centric, and I'm a huge fan of bright colors. I mainly scrap 12x12 pages, and ADORE patterned paper. Combining lots of different patterns is one of my favorite "techniques", if you can call it that.

"Hello Sweetpea", by Susan Weinroth.

The first page that I made with my big box of Bella goodies was "Hello Sweetpea". When I truly love a photo, I like to use it BIG - like I did here. I print all of my photos to scrapbook at Costco, & can squeeze at least two 12 inch wide photos (to be stretched the width of a scrapbook page like I did here) on a 12x18 print there (& the price is very economical!).

I used LOTS of papers from both the baby and spring lines (I absolutely ADORE both of these!), combining mainly tone-on-tone prints with the multi-colored heart print paper strip above the photo. And that is my best "trick" to using lots of patterned paper - choose one print with a variety of colors in it, and then pull out colors from the pattern and select tone-on-tone prints in those hues to coordinate.

I created the little "photo strip" at the top by cropping three photos from the same little 6-month photo "session" down to 2.5x2.5 squares, and then arranging on a white background in photoshop. I printed it with a white border/backing and then trimmed around evenly for the photo strip look - it's adhered to my page with foam adhesive for a little extra dimension.

"I Love These Baby Moments", by Susan Weinroth.

The second page that I scrapped with my new-found Bella stash was "Baby Memories". Lots and LOTS of smallish black & white baby photos of my youngest, Noah here. I like to keep a file of "favorites" from the year on my computer - photos that are already edited, and can easily be selected for projects. So in this case I choose a good representation from his first year favorites folder, converted all to black and white, cropped without any real parameters, and then resized them all on a blank white canvas in photoshop.

When I printed this, there was still white space around each, which made it easy to trim each with its own white "border", similar to a photo mat. I then arranged on the light blue baby pattern background, and added strips of coordinating patterns to the bottom and top of my page - again using my multi-colored pattern "tip" to tie the whole page together color-wise. The fact that the Bella Baby papers are truly a mix of my three favorite colors - blue, orange, & green - makes it SUPER easy to use these prints repeatedly!!!

I wanted to include bits of chipboard embellies on this page, so I cut a rectangular piece of patterned paper as a base for each (similar in size to the photos), and just mixed that in to my collage-style page. Machine stitching along various edges of the photos and paper prints also helped to give the page more of a cohesive look.

"Baby Love" card, by Susan Weinroth.

My third project was a baby card. A super easy way to clean up your scrapbook mess is to just create a card with the leftovers - everything is already perfectly coordinated from your scrap project! And that's exactly what I did here :)