Up & Down | Lisa-Jane Johnson | Tic-Tac-Toe

Hello there lovely crafters!  It's Lisa-Jane from Pretty My Page here today with my layout for the "Tic-Tac-Toe" challenge.  I went with the left hand vertical strip of arrows, home made embellishments and mixed up alphas.  I used to make a lot of my own embellishments and this was a good reminder to do just that.

I started my layout with the intention of making some pinwheels using a cut file from the Pretty My Page shop.  I'm getting down to the dregs of this Simple Stories collection that I've been using for my Lanzarote album so I thought I could use some of the pieces that I didn't like so much in an effort to disguise them.  I cut them into squares and stuck them on my cutting mat and then matched up the design on the screen to cut the pinwheel shapes.

When I made them into the pinwheels by folding the points into the centre, I realised that they didn't quite hide the wrong sides enough for my liking so I turned some over to the back and left others in their flat original design.

Once I'd placed my three square photos in their correct order for the story, I went with a diagonal design for the placement of the pinwheels.  I added some buttons to the centres of the pinwheels, which felt very retro, but then I couldn't stop and added a few more to add to the sense of movement and water splashes from the seal hitting the water.  

The collection I'm using came with 3 different alpha stickers so that bit was easily done although they were from the days when Simple Stories didn't do brilliant cutting so I actually had to fight to get them off the sheet!

Lastly I added some very fragile cork arrows, again to show the movement of the seal climbing up the slope and then diving into the pool.  It may not be the most "on-trend" of layouts but my Lanzarote album is lovely and colourful and this happy layout will fit right in.  I'm definitely going to have another go at making some of my own embellishments again.  It's so easy to get caught up in new things and forget some of the old techniques we've learned.

What embellishments do you like to make?  Why not hop over to our Facebook group and show us?

Bye for now