This is the year of staying home—with cancelled trips and events, we’re all becoming homebodies. Just because we’re not going out to do as much as before, doesn’t mean we don’t have stories to tell, and sometimes we can tell the stories of how our lives have changed. That’s what design team member Tracey Fox did, and she’s with us today to share her project. Let’s take a look!
Hi all! It’s Tracey Fox here with a layout I made using the Elle’s Studio September kit and extras! The Home Wood Veneer in this month’s release immediately inspired me to tell a current story about how my favorite event of the year has been canceled, making 2020 “the year we stayed home.”
Supplies | September 2020 Kit, August Cut Files, September Cut Files, This is Us Stickers, Cozy Chipboard, Autumn Rainbow Puffy Stickers, Home Wood Veneer, Navy Acetate Alphabet, Autumn Days 6 x 8.5 Inch Paper Stack
Instead of getting to take a bunch of photos of my friends enjoying the sights and delicious food at our annual pumpkin festival, I reached out to them all and asked them to send me sad selfies of them at home. I printed the photos in black and white so they would all match each other better and to add to the overall feeling of intense despair that our beloved festival had been canceled.
This layout came together quickly once I laid out my five photos and built my large title. I used the two pieces of wood grain patterned paper from the new Autumn Days Paper Stack to create a background, and I used my wide format printer to add my journaling on the vertical edge of the layout. Then, I spelled out my title using the beautiful Navy Acetate Alphabet, saving the Home Wood Veneer as the last word in the title. Because my story about staying home is sad, I wanted to create a broken heart effect on the heart on the home wood veneer. Luckily, one of the September Cut Files is the same “home” image, and I was able to use my Silhouette software to pull out just the heart portion and create a cut down the middle to create a broken heart, which I cut a few times out of the deep red paper from the Autumn Days Paper Stack. I stuck one of them directly on top of the wood veneer and used the others to add some extra embellishment to my long title.
Since I used a neutral background and black and white photos, I wanted to add some more color to the page. I grabbed a bunch of the colorful tags from the September Kit and layered them under the photos, placing sentiments from the This is Us Stickers and Cozy Chipboard that went with my story around the page on top of the photos. As a final touch of embellishment, I added some of the Autumn Rainbow Puffy Stickers in a visual triangle. Even though the topic and tone of my page was sad, I loved those rainbows too much not to use them, so I decided that they could represent frowns! That totally works, right?
I really loved collecting these photos from my friends to create a page that will fill the gap left by the cancellation of this event in my scrapbook this year. Have you ever scrapbooked about events that aren’t happening? The new Home Wood Veneer and a lot of the sentiments in the September Kit provide a perfect prompt to tell a story about staying home this year during the pandemic. I can’t wait to see what stories you will document!
Share what your September stories look like—good or bad—in our Elle’s Studio Facebook Group, or on Instagram with the hashtag #EllesStudio!