Member Monday with Kat Glossop

Yay for Mondays and a new Layout of the Week. This week's Layout of the Week was chosen by Kat Glossop. Kat chose the layout below by Rachel Theall, also known as "happay scrappay" on the message boards.

"Beach Buddies" by Rachel Theall


Rachel is a new member to AMM, so Kat did a little interview with her. Read on to get to know this newbie a little better.

1. Tell us a little bit about yourself? I'm a 36 year old wife of 7 years and mother to two wonderful,spirited little boys. I spend my weekdays as a chemistry professor training students to teach chemistry at all levels (pre-school to high school) and doing research on forensic chemistry and chemistry education. The rest of my time I spend with my family, outside or doing crafty things as much as possible. We just planted our first garden and I just taught myself to knit so I can be crafty at times when I can't be scrapbooking. I started scrapbooking in 1998 and seem to have forgotten how to put pages into books in about 2005! (I need to fix that soon.)

2. This LO is beautifully designed - can you tell us how you go about creating a page? Do you know how it's going to turn out or do you just start sticking things down? "Beach Buddies" started off a sketch though it looks very little like the sketch now. There was a section on the sketch where a wide strip of paper was to be placed, I decided to flip that because I wanted to put a sun in. I cut the sun on my Silhouette but I just couldn't get it to look right how the sketch was oriented. So, I went my own way.The cloud paper was a diecut shape from GCD Studios and I wanted to keep the background shape so I cut strips of the pink GCD studios paper to fold and glue behind it to provide enough overlap to glue the entire shape to the background. Then I realized, that the pictures would stand out more if they were on a yellow background. I trimmed out the center of the shaped paper and put the yellow Core'dinations paper behind it. The sketch had a circular frame on the page and I thought the yellow background needed something so I sprayed glimmer mist over a square in the middle of the page. I added the strips of paper to the bottom of the pictures because I wanted to create a sand effect. I had originally intended to use the clouds only around the sun but I liked them spread through out the page and some of them are on foam tape to make them stick out. The last thing I added was the heart. It was just sitting on the table from another page I had been working on. The heart seemed to tie everything together so well and to show how much my boys love each other and the beach. Creating this page followed my normal process, I usually start off with an idea, cutout a bunch of things, move them around on the page, make a decision about one part and glue it down, move more things around on the page,glue some more down until I decide it's enough, and finish with the title and journaling.

The colors are gorgeous, I understand you did it for a challenge, do you take part in a lot of challenge blogs? If so what are your favorite sort of challenges? "Beach Buddies" was created for The Color Room - a new challenge group. I do like to do challenges and I have a notebook I keep for the challenges I want to do. My favorite challenges are color challenges followed closely by sketch challenges. I also like to do challenges where there is a list of items to use. I feel like the color and list challenges help me to mix up my product and use it up. I usually create a few pages from a single manufacturer but then have plenty of left overs that I wouldn't use otherwise. Challenges are a great way to make sure I don't have a lot of really fun products that don't make their way onto a page.

You've hand written on the page, isn't that scary!? You have gorgeous handwriting, do you often hand journal? I always hand write on my pages. I have only a handful of pages that I've ever used the printer for the journaling. So, I don't find it scary, and I like the way it looks. I do think that my writing is a little messy and sometimes have to go over it twice to make sure that it's readable. I should do this with my students' papers, too, because they are always asking me, "what's this say?" LOL



Thanks for sharing with us Kat and Rachel! Be sure to leave Rachel some love on this post and check out the rest of her AMM gallery here.