Bella Blvd Studio Blog: September Guest Designer: Christine Newman

We are so excited to introduce you to our talented September Guest Designer, Christine Newman! Let's get to know a little more about Christine and check out the projects she created to share with us!

Hi Everyone! My name is Christine Newman and I’m so excited to be the September guest designer at Bella Blvd! I’m really loving the fall and holiday collections from Bella Blvd and I can’t wait to show you my projects!

A little bit about me. I’m known in the scrapbooking world mainly as “listgirl”. I’ve been scrapbooking since 2008. I love to tell my life stories with photos and pretty papers. I love scrapbooking because looking back on my memories with the people I love make me so happy and thankful! It’s also such a great artistic outlet for me, combining my favorite hobbies of photography, scrapbooking, computers, internet, and writing. I live in Southern California with my husband Todd and our cat Noodle. I work full-time as a financial analyst for a high-tech company. I love to eat, which means I try to workout as often as possible to offset my intake. I also love to read, knit/crochet, make cards, stamp, sew, and get my hands into anything crafty! You can find me sharing my life and crafty projects on my blog and on Instagram.

"Pumpkins", by Christine Newman.

Since I live in SoCal, I usually don’t have a lot of fall photos. However, last year we went to a big pumpkin patch for the first time. It was 85 degrees in October and so hot! But I did get a bunch of fall-ish pumpkin photos, so I was delighted when I saw the new Bella Blvd fall collection Hello Autumn! The colors were perfect with my photos.

I love that this collection has blue colors in it too. It really pops against the oranges and yellows.

I created a little leaf tag for the upper left corner of my layout, using a diecut tag and a chipboard leaf.

The stickers in Hello Autumn were one of my favorite things! I just love the sticker tabs that I can adhere to photos or papers. And that leaf paper is the best ever!

I had been eyeing these whimsical alphabet stickers for a while. So glad they come with this collection too!

"Holiday Spirit", by Christine Newman.

My next two pages were created with the Christmas Cheer collection. I love the happy colors in this collection. The reindeers were my favorite! In fact, it inspired my selection of the photo for my second layout, “Holiday Spirit”.

Aren’t the antlers perfect with the cute reindeers? Yes I know, I have a very patient and cooperative husband, ha ha.

I used a triangle punch to punch out a bunch of triangles from my favorite papers in the collection. Then I placed them to make sure they fit and look good, then I glued them down.

I layered vellum under the photo and the title so that they stood out from the triangle patterned background. I added some stickers and little embellishments on top of the vellum mat, to make it more festive!

I framed the photo with some of the border, tab, and word stickers, giving a layered look.

"Ornament Thief", by Christine Newman.

I love how cute yet usable this Christmas Cheer collection is! I caught a photo of my cat Noodle trying to take an ornament off the tree a couple of years ago. I thought I would create a tree filled with the pretty papers in my next layout, “Ornament Thief”.

I used a digital brush in Photoshop to create the tree shape. Then I saved it as a jpeg file and brought it into my Silhouette Studio software to trace it for cutting. Then I filled the cut-out “windows” with patterned papers.

I thought the green feather was perfect under the photo, sort of like a tree branch.

I used my Silhouette to cut out the word “thief” and stapled it to my photo as part of my title. I sewed around the edge of the tree with red stitching for the finishing touch.