Tips & Tricks Tuesday #6 - Making Backgrounds from Shapes

Hi everyone! Sharing the latest technique I showed my Scrapbook with Me group last week. We worked on creating layouts based on a sketch from the Close To My Heart Blog. I changed mine up by creating some of the paper pieces from shapes and taught this technique to my group during the session. Here is my finished layout.

The layout uses the retired Oh Deer Collection from Close To My Heart along with the Huntington sketch, which can be found on the blog here.

There are multiple ways to create and use shapes as background pieces in your layouts. To cut the shapes you can use any of the following:

- Punches
- Metal dies
- Shapes available in Design Space for the Cricut
- A cutting system like that from Creative Memories
- Strips of paper, like Zip Strips from Close To My Heart patterned paper packs.

Using shapes is also a great way to use up scraps of paper!

To use the shapes you can do the following:

- Create the background piece on a separate piece of cardstock and then adhere to your layout.
- Create the background piece directly on your layout. Have a couple of the shapes overlap your photos - as you can see below.
- Add the shapes in a random pattern on your layout.
- You can leave spacing between the shapes to have your background paper show through or you can adhere the shapes right next to each other.

Here are a few examples of using shapes from other layouts I have done in the past. I do think I might be a little biased towards hexagons.

For my layout, from the session, I created the background pieces using a piece of coordinating cardstock since I wanted the color to show through, almost like "grout" would with tiles. My steps are shown as follows:

Step 1: Draw a line down the center of the piece and start laying out the shapes to create your
pattern, without adhering so you can play with placement. When ready adhere to the cardstock.
I left a few spots open on the top and bottom to fill in later.

Step 2: Trim off the excess pieces that overhang the cardstock.

Step 3: Use the extra pieces to fill in where you left blanks.

Alternate 1: Adhere 1/2" wide strips to the cardstock.

Alternate 2: Adhere the 1/2" wide strips on a diagonal to the cardstock.

You can check out my video on this technique on my YouTube Channel, here or by watching below.

I hope you enjoyed the tips & tricks and the video. Thanks for stopping by!