For this layout about my sons football team dinners the spoon, knife and fork from Kitchen Traditions 2 is an obvious choice, but I had to get creative to come up with the checkered plate. I copied and pasted the red check background from the All American Creatable to a workspace. I sized it to 8”. I then added a 5” circle to the center with no outside line and white fill. To create the outside I added another circle measuring 7.7” with a 9pt white line and no fill. Cut out around the outside white circle and you have yourself an adorable checkered picnic plate.

For this layout the blue in the sky and the blue shadows on the snow is what really caught my eye. Instead of looking for winter graphics I headed to the beach theme and found these great backgrounds in the Tide Pool Scrapable. I printed the Blue Stripes and Brown Plaid background. I cut the striped background into random sized strips and the plaid into random sized blocks. I arranged my 4x6 photos in a pinwheel formation on my layout. After deciding how I was going to tuck my background stripes and blocks behind my photos, I rounded the corners that would be exposed and chalked the edges in brown. With the formation of the pictures being so square the rounded edges of the graphics and embellishments help soften the layout. Stitching around the outside of the layout and rounding the corners help pull everything together. If you don’t want to sew on your layout, creating stitch lines with a fine tip marker will give a nice effect also.

• Aliens Creatable by Tammy Sherman


Okay, maybe using these alien graphics isn’t Thinking Outside The Box with these crazy pictures but I did have to look at them differently then what I saw in my pcHugBug Browser. I thought these little aliens and the title were adorable and fit perfectly with the photos. The problem was the colors didn’t match. So, after I had them in my workspace, I went to format, picture, and layout. Click on, In Front of Text. Then go to the picture tab and under image control choose Grayscale. If your graphic seems a little to dark to color over then go choose Washout under image control. You now have a graphic that you can color in using markers or color pencils. I outlined mine using a black marker and colored them in with color pencil.