Insider Tips: Nicole Samuels

According to Mae West, "Too much of a good thing is....wonderful." And in the case of certain scrapping supplies, such as SC's new wood veneer shapes, I'd have to agree with her! I often take cool embellishments and use a whole bunch of them on one page. It can make a strong visual statement on your layout. So, for this page I tore open a pack of the wood veneer frames and went to town! Did you know the packs come with two sheets?! That wiped away any momentary guilt I felt about using more than one on a single layout. Anyways, first I needed to come up with my overall design. I decided to use 4 frames nested inside each other.

Then I pulled out the photos I had printed to use and realized they weren't going to work at the printed size. Too big for the frames I selected.

So, back to photoshop to resize and reprint. I just measured the inside opening of the frames I wanted to fill and plugged that into the width value on image size. I should have done this before my first printing!

Once I had the photos figured out and cut down to fit the right frames, I pulled out a pack of the Wood Veneer Stars and the Stars Ledger Rub-ons. I love that the size of the star rub-ons coordinates so well with the sizes of the veneer. Brilliant! And they go on to the veneer like butter!

The last little tidbit I'll share is about Mister Huey's. I won't lie... I am a little afraid of misting. I've admitted that before. I mean, what if I mess it up! But one misting technique I've come to LOVE is using mist to color something like chipboard, alphas, or in this case, veneer. I used some of the Elementary colors of Mister Huey's to create custom letters for my title. It worked fabulously and gives the title the pop I wanted. Here's my completed page...

Supplies: FabRips - Elementary; Stickers - Elementary; Paper - Anthology Periodical; Wood Veneer - Stars, Frames, Alphabet; Rub-Ons - Star Graph; Mister Huey's - Applejack, Schoolhouse, and Atmosphere

Okay, THIS is my final insider tip. The fabRIPS are great for doing print journaling on. Just print out what you want on a normal piece of paper. Adhere the fabRIP over top of the printed section. Re-run it through your printed and viola... perfect! And since it's not overly sticky adhesive, you can pull it right off the plain paper and stick in right on your page.

Hope to see you using "too much" of something wonderful some time soon!