Long Lost Cousins | Laura Jane Thomson | Sewing

Hi friends, how are you all?

Today I am here with my monthly blog post as part of the UK Scrap Addicts creative team.  For April our focus was layouts which involved an element of sewing, this is not something I was familiar with as I have Fibromyalgia and as such, a lot of problems with my hands but I was definitely up for the challenge. 

Whilst looking through my extensive (make that 'way too much') stash of crafty goodness I came across something which I purchased a few years ago which was still in the packaging!!  A We R Memory Keepers Sew Easy kit with a couple of different adaptors.  So out it came. 

I had been thinking about scrapbooking this photograph for some time, it's a photograph of my partner with a six foot tall, metal gorilla sculpture which was taken in a garden centre in Scotland a couple of years ago while we were visiting my Dad.  I had a range of threads which included grey, black and blue so decided now was the time to try a masculine layout. 

This is a 12x12inch single page layout which has a strip of patterned paper stitched horizontally, across the middle of the page.  As this was my first try with my Sew Easy tool I decided to use a straight stitch, rather than anything too fancy to begin with.  

In the centre of my stitched panel I used a piece of self adhesive metallic mesh from my stash to compliment the metal sculpture in the photograph before adding my photograph which was layered onto four layers of pattern paper and some funky foam to add dimension. 

I finished this page with a few embellishments, some ink splatters, thickers for my title and a couple of small phrase stickers. 

My advice to anyone who has never tried sewing on a layout would be to just give it a try... you never know what will happen until you try it, if you like it great!  If it doesn't work for you then it's only a piece of paper and a little bit of thread.

As someone who has problems with my hands, I found the We R Memory Keepers Sew Easy tool really easy to work with, although I did use my pokey tool to go through each hole before stitching to make it a little easier but I'm quite happy with the result and would definitely try this again.

Thank you for visiting and reading my post, don't forget to check back regularly for lots of great scrapbooking ideas from the UK Scrap Addicts creative team both here on our blog and over on YouTube.