Layout: So Very Young!

Hello, hello.

I've been catching up on a little Flickr gallery admin this week. Every now and again [when I remember and when I have the time] I upload my recent projects to my Flickr stream so that, as well as some of them appearing in blog posts here and there, they're all in one place.

Sometimes, when I'm feeling self-critical and lazy ... a quick skim through my ever-expanding gallery acts like a small slap round the face ...

So, while I was adding to my archive this week I realised how I never? /hardly ever? blog any of my magazine work. I think that the main reason for this is the long lead time on them. The time between having made the project, it being pubished, and the being able to blog about it can be something like 3 months.

Sometimes I forget to blog about something I made yesterday. Never mind 3 months ago! Which is why my magazine work usually just gets uploaded to Flickr without a dedicated post to each project.

However, while I was about to upload the following layout, I decided that I'd had such fun making it that I wanted to share it here too:

One of 5 items in the set [you can see it alongside the others here] it appeared in Issue 82 of Papercraft Inspirations Magazine [Dec/Jan 2010-11]. The commission was simply to make use of a specific stamp set ['All in the Family' from Stampin Up].

The set is made up of individual heads / bodies/ legs and arms m aking it fully interchangeable and easy to customise. And after creating several straightforward characters with it, I thought I'd try something a little more creative and took my inspiration from the ancient photobooth strip photo of me and James:

There's probably a 'proper' papercrafting term for how I did this ... but I don't know it ... so I'll try to explain ....

• It's as simple as making little 'masks' to cover over areas you don't want to stamp on.
• For eg. on the bottom 'photo' - I stamped the boy head first, stamped it again on scrap paper, cut the scrap out, placed it over the originla and then stamped the girl face. Even though she overlaps - the section of her face which would have obscured hiws is actually only stamped on to the scrap of paper which is then removed.
• I also made little scrap paper frames for each of the 'photos' so I could stamp over the edge of the border - then I removed the frames leaving the images contained inside.

Does any of that make sense? If not, and you'd really like to try this, just shout up and I'll take some step-by-step photos].

It's a technique I'd like to try again maybe with different stamps, although the beauty of these was how flexible all of those individual elements made it. Even the spectacles were a tiny individual stand-alone stamp, so you can add on to any face. Which I did ... did you spot how the stamped 'me' pinched the stamped 'James's glasses in the last 'photo'?

Fiddly ... but a very cute end result!

[Naturally I'm referring here to 'cute' as in 'cute-in-a-good-way'. Not the other kind. Not 'cute' cute. Don't ever let me wander oblivious into the dark-side of cute. Please. My crafting-soul will thank you for it.]

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Do let me know if you've done something similar with stamps or if you'd like me to give a [better] visual explanation or ... if you actually know the 'proper' term for that technique!

Thanks for dropping in on me today.

Julie