Stitching on my pages: from the Scrapinar

Wednesday I had a wonderful evening participating as a panelist in a scrapinar on stitching for Lain Ehmann. I made my first video tutorial, this time on stitching on layouts,* and I spent some time answering questions on stitching and enjoying the company of people who love this craft of ours. You can see my video here.

It's fitting, I suppose, that the first video I made is on stitching. I have sewn and cross-stitched for a long time. I am cross-stitching a sampler right now with a verse ("The diligent farmer plants tress of which he himself will never see the fruit") and sewing various Star Wars crafts. I also had two pages this week picked up for the July Scrapbook Trends magazine, both of which included stitching, and one of which will be published in the stitching section. I love to add stitches to my pages. Love.

I wanted to share the pages I made for that scrapinar, plus some extra tidbits I didn't share in the scrapinar, which of course came to me after it was done. (For the record, I used Studio Calico's January kit Block Party for all of these layouts. I added bits from my stash as well, since these were the last pages I made with the kit.)

Here's the first page I made, which highlights the machine stitching I tend to do:

I didn't do any hand stitching on this page, but I did some typical machine stitching as a frame and to zig zag some elements together at the top of the page.  Here's some details:

Here's the second page I did. I love the design, and I hand stitched the tickets together to add some contrasting color and texture to the page. I also stitched a line through one of the paper strips (just me stripping on a page again, LOL!) to add some texture. Plus, a confession: I had used an adhesive eraser to remove some gummed up adhesive, and it damaged the patterned paper. The stitching distracts from my damage.

Here's the third page, probably my favorite since it depicts the group I scrap with, the Scrappin' J's. On that note, mad props to the first J's: Janet for taking photos of me stitching that I used in my video; Sandra, which was going to but got sick; Jennifer, who took the photos in the above layout; and Jolene, who at first couldn't believe I sewed on pages but now does so beautifully herself.

I hand and machine stitched on this page:

And the last layout, a gift I made for my parents (they're not interested in much else but scrapbooking pages from me). I hand stitched circles using my Bazzill template and I machine stitched the title and date.

 

  

Note: looking above, you can see that super thin letters are not good to stitch on. Learn my lesson before you stitch and only sew on thick letters/numbers like the ones below:

 Thank you for viewing my pages! And now share: do you stitch on your layouts? If so, what do you tend to do?

*Just a quick note: I am planning on making two more videos at least, one of heat embossing multiple colors at once and another on making a mini album. Come back and share in the videos! I'm hoping to make one or two a month, possibly more when I'm not grading papers in the summer (heh).

Free stitching scrapinar at Layout a Day

I've been working on two things lately:

1. Commenting on student drafts of their persuasive papers.
2. Putting together an online presentation on adding stitching to your pages.

The first will take me the month of February to see to the end; the latter is almost done and ready to be sent off. Here's the details:

If you go to Lain Ehmann's Layout a Day site and sign up, you can participate next week! 

A side note: people sometimes ask me where I learned to design, or how I can scrap so quickly and purposefully. Two things: Design Your Life by Cathy Zielske at Big Picture Classes, and Layout a Day (LOAD) with Lain Ehmann. The first was billed as a class where you would be able to look at a page and know in an instant what the page needs; I have to say the class lives up to its billing. It's still offered as a self-paced class, heartily recommended by me.

LOAD I did several times. The practice of making a page a day sped up my process; posting into a private Flickr gallery and receiving comments from other participants helped me develop a keen understanding of my style. This helped me improve my design process, because I knew what worked for me, so I did it. Less pondering and moving stuff around the page.

Both of these options cost money, but I decided a few years ago I wanted to spend my money on experiences more than stuff, and I got my money's worth with these two. I recommend them.

And if money is tight? Well, go sign up for the stitching seminar!