Bella Blvd Studio Blog: Guest Designer for January

Hi! My name is Jill Sprott, and I am excited and honored to be a guest designed at Bella Blvd this month!

I like to think that my life, like my scrapbook pages, is colorful. I hail from ‘Oahu, Hawai’i, where I live with my little but loud family, which includes multiple humans and several furchildren. I teach English at an all-girls’ school in Honolulu, where my creativity is challenged and fed constantly. When the weekend rolls around, I exchange one stack of papers for another, of the patterned variety. I have been scrapbooking for over a decade now. For me, it’s more than a hobby — it is all about learning to recognize the extraordinary in the ordinary. Through scrapbooking, I tell the stories that are uniquely mine to tell as well as the stories entrusted to me by others.
As the January guest designer, I will admit to being more than a little daunted by the task of kicking off a new year. I decided to embrace the challenge and focus on the year to come with a self-portrait layout, using a monochromatic approach and the Oh My Stars collection.

This year, I fought the urge to make any resolutions, since I’m pretty lousy at keeping them. I am, however, a believer in entering the new year with a fresh perspective, so I selected a word, rather than a resolution, for 2017: “notice.”Since the act of noticing is about being attentive not just to the obvious but also to the subtle details, the layout is a mix of nuanced and bold elements. I softened the background with white paint from the Illustrated Faith line, and then added an extra pop of color to the patterned paper, the tags, and the title letters.While one layout looks ahead, another layout looks back at one of the highlights of the past year. I pulled together elements from the Addison, Oh My Stars, and Illustrated Faith “You Are Loved” collections to help me to tell story of a transformative service project, in which students at my school assisted the residents of a long-term care facility.Once again, paint adds a color boost to the page. To lend some dimension to the letters in the title, I backed some of the alphabets with foam circles.The elements on this page reinforce the virtues of hope, faith, and charity that I witnessed in action through the project.The last of my three layouts combines a bunch of photos from past and present, to document a job I take seriously but that still keeps me laughing on most days, that of dog mother.

The design of this page was inspired by belly spots, dirty paws, and gleeful romps through the grass. Luckily, Bella Blvd has the perfect colors and patterns needed to convey that dog-happy vibe.

I had lots of fun composing the journaling, which includes a list of behaviors common to parents of dog-folk. After printing the journaling in strips, I added some playful stitching, extending it to the photos and the layers of the page.

It’s been a thrill to start off the year in the best of ways, with lots of color and energy, courtesy of Bella Blvd!

Supply List:
Oh My Stars Collection: Macintosh Stars, Borders, Cotton Candy Stars, 4x6s Papers; Fundamentals Stickers, Colorful and Black + White Tabbies, Washi Stickers; Addison Collection: Free Spirit, Fierce Papers, 6x8" Paper Pad, Illustrated Faith You Are Loved Collection: Fundamentals Stickers, Designer Clips, Washi Stickers, Tabbies. Illustrated Faith Basics: Acrylic Paints, Watercolor Paints