IMP Design Team Melinda Staley | March Pages, Part 1

Hi everyone. Melinda here today on the blog, bringing you a look at the first of my March pages. I feel like I might be getting into a good pattern now for the year, maybe. These first few months can be hard sometimes, I think because I have been getting a feel for the things I picked in those first weeks of the year hoping they would work well together. After these first weeks/months I’m pretty confident that I have a plan that does work now, which makes things go more quickly when putting a page together.

So let’s jump right in! I chose to work with Dunia Designs Spring card set for this first set of March pages, adding the month from Dunia’s Monthly Cards and recoloring it with a color overlay to match for this first set of March pages. The plants are blooming everywhere here right now as the weather warms up, mostly. We’ve had a few cold spots in March too, as well as overly warm temps in some stretches. The soft white, pink, and green colors were a nice neutral-ish palette to go with the variety of colors in my photos for the first half of the month. I kept the layout of the page pretty basic, choosing a template from the 365 Unscripted Stitched Grids 4 by Traci Reed with a mix of square and rectangular photo spots since I wanted to include one of the Ukraine tribute memes I had come across on social media and saved. One of Dunia’s Basic card templates let me combine several photos for one pocket spot easily, and gave me a journaling spot to boot – definitely one of my faves I can see me using every month as I always have too many photos I want to use. I chose Rachel Jefferies Designs Serendipty mixed media pack to use with these cards. The colors are very close and I liked that it had clover leaves in it. We had one last snow storm over a weekend, and while it was pretty small the little bit of snow hung around on the bushes and grass for a couple of days. I wanted a subtle accent for the one snow photo I included to go with the “Despite the forecast” saying card. I was thinking some clear acrylic snowflakes and couldn’t find any in my stash, so I just made my own with custom shapes in my PSE library and an acrylic layer style by Mommyish. I chose a thicker acrylic style to give the clear elements a bit more edge to help them stand out.

For page 2 of this set I decided to work with the exact same template. In my final album the square photos will continue in a line across the whole spread giving the two pages some visual continuity in addition to being made with the same scrap designs. The biggest design choice I made here was to fill the top left corner spots on the template with a pocket stuffed with clover leaves and flowers. This pocket was something I pulled from a mixed media page I did in February for a challenge with the Serendipity collection. After opening the page file, I made the pocket and all of its layers into a group and then dragged it onto the new page – simple as that!  Once that was added to the page I only needed a few small element clusters around the page to finish it off.

One other design choice I want to point out on this page before I go. See that middle row of squares? It’s not quite square anymore at least at first glance. I had the picture of my daughter’s band and I wanted to make sure I included the whole thing top to bottom as I love the subtle colors of the ceiling overhead – it gives a very dark photo some pop and interest. Putting a rectangular photo in the middle of square pockets is much easier to deal with on a digital page – I just stretched that square photo spot into a rectangle with the transform tool. That left me with some space on the left from the middle pocket. I stretched the left pocket slot too and filled it with a 4×6 card from the Spring card set. I decided to leave the vertical stitching there on the left to anchor a journal strip and use the rest of the blank space to journal on for that photo. Once I had finished my page and started saving the various versions I use, I noticed that I had forgotten to remove the vertical stitching on the right side of that middle strip since the photo is so dark. I could have gone back and removed it at that point, but I decided not to. The photo is dark and it isn’t very noticeable, and I’ll just leave it as a deliberate design choice at this point in time even if it was a subconscious one 😉

Full credits for these pages can be found on my IMP Pinterest board.