Guest Designer | Antonia Sherlock

Today we welcome Antonia as our guest designer...

Hi everyone, my name is Antonia and I am absolutely over the moon to be invited to be a guest designing for UK Scrap Addicts this month! I live in the West Midlands with my family - I am a busy mum of two with a full time job and a compulsive need to scrap, so juggling is the word that best
describes my lifestyle...  I've been scrapbooking for years, but only recently mustered the courage to put my work "out there"...

I was so excited to find out that this month the focus is on layering. I love layering, to me more is more when it comes to embellishments. The real challenge is to know when to stop... I use layering as a technique on most of my layouts, and most of the time I use patterned paper as a background. Every now and again though, when I come across super-lovely embellishments, I opt for a cardstock background, so the embellishments can be fully showcased without anything else competing for the attention. This is what I did on the layout I made for this blog post.

I worked with the Lottie Loves Paper August kit, which is thoroughly awesome. It features the new Carousel collection from Maggie Holmes. I purchased the coordinating paper kit and cardstock kit as well as the ephemera pack from the same collection. I chose the pink cardstock as it coordinates with the top I'm wearing on the photo. It's also super-girly... I did some tone-on- tone stamping for the background - it's subtle, but gives texture to the
layout. It can also be considered as the first layer in the clustering process.

On layouts like this, I tend to go for three clusters in a triangle. Two near to the photo and a smaller one, further away. As I didn't use any patterned paper for the background, I placed the third cluster right at the bottom of the page, to ground it.

I had to be careful that the two clusters near the photo don't draw the attention away from it. I went for relatively large pieces of the ephemera, but only a few, with muted colours and no crazy patterns. I took care that the two embellishment clusters were balanced: they both had a bit of pale
pink, a bit of teal, gold glitter and plenty of black and white. I'm not a bow person, but I loved how the dark pink bow popped on the page, so it went on the zebra's neck. To balance it out, I added a puffy heart, same in colour, to the other embellishment cluster.

I struggled a bit with the title. Ideally, I would have liked it near the photo, but it just simply didn't work. I didn't have a specific title in mind, so I tried out various words and phrases. Everything was either too big, dwarfing the photo, or too small, being dwarfed by the clusters. So in the end I made
a decision to include the title in the third embellishment cluster. The word "happy" is from the puffy sticker sheet and it was just right in size and in colour to keep the status quo. 

I was quite happy with how the layout was turning out, but something was still missing. I didn't want to use ink splatters, in fear of making the background too busy, so I opted for sequins. I find them more manageable than ink - you have full control in where they go on the layout. I chose yellow sequins as they complement the layout and they are subtle in colour.

To finish it all, I managed to make a bit of a mess with the date stamp, but I ended up leaving it like that - messing up is part of my style, too... ;-)
Hope you like my layout. I have created a process video making it - this is my first video ever, so needless to say, it's very exciting for me. 

Thank you for this opportunity from the UKSA team, it's been a real pleasure creating this layout for you!

If you'd like to join us as a guest designer drop us an email at UKScrapAddicts@gmail.com