Celebrating Your Influence

Another day, another Life Book page for you.  This is the full lesson from week 10 of Life Book.  I shared my page from week 11 yesterday, because I had worked these lessons out of order.

This page had a much more scrapbook feel to it than our normal Life Book pages.  We started by sticking two pages of watercolour paper together with sticky tape.  This turned out to be a mistake for me, as you will soon see if you read on, but it was what was suggested in the lesson, so I went with it.  I cut 1 inch off the long side of one of the pages and then covered both sides with a base coat of gesso following up with with watercolour crayons and gesso.

I chose the paler one to be the front and the brighter one to be the back.

When working the watercolour over the sticky tape, some of the base coat of gesso came up, peeling up as if it was masking fluid being rubbed off.  Working over that with gesso and acrylics, helped, but it got worse later when I needed to alter something.

This lesson was all about celebrating our influence on others (you could do their influence on you if you preferred, but I wanted to go with this), so I chose some photos and worked out a layout I liked.

I glued a piece of ribbon across the page and made pencil marks where I wanted the pictures to go.  I did not think this out carefully enough and did not consider what would happen to any photos put over the fold in the page.

I then did some stamping around the areas where the photos would go.

I worked on altering some of the photos.  I used sandpaper around the edges and then wet certain parts of the photo and scratched into it.

That's an old photo of my husband from when we were dating.

I mounted all the photos and glued them down.  This is where things really started to go wrong and I realised the problems I was going to have with folding the page.  The top photo wasn't too bad because there was was quite a bit of photo either side of the fold, but the bottom one was a different matter.  The part to the left of the fold just would not stay glued down, no matter what I tried.  In the end I cut the left hand edge of that photo and it's mounting paper.  But that pulled up all colour that was laid down over the sticky tape used at the start.

I used some acrylic paint and smudged it over that area with my finger.

I also added text to the page and began embellishing the page with other scrap booking goodies.

I really didn't like the text in the top left, so cut out a piece of card to fit that area, and stamped and embossed part of the title while writing the other part.

But that left the page feeling off balanced with that blank space at the bottom right, so I used a tag shaped peel off on the same card used at the top left, cut it out and glued it down.

Take a look at some of the details:

The back of the flap was made into a list of the people who I have had the privilege of being a positive influence in their lives.  To store the page and later make it into a page in the book, I needed to use a paper clip, to keep it folded.

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