Guest Designer - Christine Smith

Today we welcome the first of April's guest designers - meet Christine Smith...

Hi, I’m Christine & I’ve been asked to be a guest designer today which I’m thrilled about.  I’ve always had a love of all things crafty!  There aren’t many crafts that I haven’t dabbled in but my real crafty passion is scrapbooking which I’ve been doing since 2003 after a trip to the States.  My scrapping style tends to be on the ‘less is more look’ and I love a bit of ‘white space’!

I was excited to hear the theme for this month was all about sewing - I love sewing on layouts, it adds dimension & texture.  There are a number of ways to sew on a layout but I decided to show you how easy it is to use a template to create a title.  I’ve also machine stitched a border & hand sewn a few swirly lines to make it look like my butterflies are flying up the page.

I started off with machine sewing my border.  Now I’m not a seamstress so rarely get a good straight line when sewing so instead I tend to go for the wobbly line look, just feeding my paper through my sewing machine a little bit to the left then a little bit to the right.  I quite like the random effect.  The next step was creating my title, which I wanted to look like it was linked to the border.

To create my title I used a stencil by We Are Memory Keepers called ‘Sew Easy ~ Script’ which is easy to use.  You just need to place your paper on a soft mat, line up where you want your word/title to be as shown in the photo, then with a paper piercer, you can start piercing the holes ready for sewing.  Try not to move either your paper or the stencil whilst you are piercing or you may end up with a hole where you don’t want it!  After you have pierced your word, remove the stencil & using 2 strands of thread start sewing, keep the stencil nearby so you can see which holes to stitch.

I finished the layout off by hand stitching the butterfly swirls, using just one strand of cotton.  I didn’t want the effect to show up too much.

And the finished layout;

I would like to thank the UK Scrap Addict team for giving me the opportunity to be a guest on their lovely blog & I hope you will all give sewing on paper a go so you can see how much fun and therapeutic it is.

Thanks very much Christine!  You can see more of Christine's work in
her UKS gallery here.