Summer 1954

I love anything ‘vintage’, and as I had a shoebox full of old family photos, I thought it would be fun to make up a layout of my mom and I, on the beach in the UK in 1954! All of the albums my mom made up during that time, consisted of black paper backgrounds with writing done in white ink, and white lines drawn around the photos. So, this layout, using a sketch from Lets Scrap is meant to emulate her style.

I scanned in 4 tiny black and white photographs, converted them to 246 colour, then using Photoshop CS2 I only coloured in the costumes, to create these unusual b/w photographs. The edges were torn and the photos mounted onto black cardstock, and white gel pen lines drawn on opposite corners. After trimming, these were mounted onto larger pieces of white cardstock which had already been embossed with a Cuttlebug border (Iron Works) on one side, traced with a glue pen, glittered, then cut out. The main background paper is plain black cardstock, with rectangles cut out of Fancy Pants (Rough & Tough) and some b/w paper from my stash. The little fence was cut out of FabScraps paper with the Cuttlebug, using a die from Seart Craft (Lace#53). All the seashells and starfish were cut and embossed out of white cardstock, using a Cuttlebug die (from the sea). The raised edges were traced with a COPIC pen (E25), then the whole image was distressed with Creamy Brown pastel chalk from Color Box. The sandcastle and bucket/spade were cut with the Cuttlebug die ‘at the beach’. The title boxes were cut out of white cardstock with the Cuttlebug ‘hearts & stamps’ set, then mounted onto smooth black card, and the writing was done with the white gel pen.

I fell in love with the vintage embellishment set designed by Rosey Posey ("seashore"). The chosen images were sized to fit, printed out three times on photographic paper to give that glossy feeling, and then just simply paper-pieced to create a 3D effect. The signboard image was embellished further by adding tiny ‘real’ shells I found at my local scrapbooking store! The bunting was probably the easiest to make in the whole layout, as I drew black triangles in Powerpoint, added white text and printed them on white card. When cutting out the triangles, a tiny white border was left around each black triangle.

 

I achieved what I set out to do – to re-create my mom’s artisitc flair, yet with a modern touch. Hope you like it!