Get Inspired: Seed Packets

Morning everyone! I’m sitting here in my little part of this strange new world we find ourselves in, enjoying the birdsong. It is one of the things that has not changed and it brings me immense joy. I hope you are finding some joy today too.

A long time ago, back in 2009 in fact, Katie introduced to the store a gorgeous pack of vintage seed packets.

I was immediately struck by the Shasta Daisy Seed Packet because it reminded me of my mum. She always planted Shasta Daisies along the edge of the garden path that led to our front door. Sometime later I took some photos of mum and especially her hands at a family wedding. This prompted some reminiscent writing about my mum and this layout was born. I loved having the Shasta Daisy Packet to tuck into a cluster of elements that all have some significance to me when I think about mum.

Katie’s seed packets include some vegetable seeds that would be great to use to document some Spring gardening and the old fashioned flower seed packets are bound to spark memories of a particular friend, mum, aunty or grandma. Come to think of it – we could use the Ranunculus packet to do a page about Katie!!!

In this layout documenting a Great-Grandmother whom I never met (isn’t she gorgeous). I used a favorite design of mine; a row of elements with the Photo laid over the top. Usually I would use pocket cards, journaling labels or pieces of paper, but this time I used the seed packets and I like the touch of colour and character they add to a heritage page.

I don’t know about you, but one of the positive things about recent times for me has been the multitude of small kindnesses that I’ve experienced as people try to stay in touch. We have not been in complete lock-down here and our government has been determined to keep schools open to both needy children and the children of essential workers. In one week I had a friend drop off at my door a warm loaf of home-baked rye sourdough and another friend pass a jar of honey from her beehives through the classroom door. The colours in the Ranunculus seed packet matched the colour of the honey in the photo. I altered the seed packet by cutting it in two and moving one side in to make a narrower element to fit the space in my layered arrangement.

In my last layout, I did tuck a seed packet underneath the photo, but it was the popsicle stick included in the element pack that I wanted to use. I duplicated it and used the two sticks to create a half-frame element that ‘holds down’ the photo and is held down in turn by a staple. I was able to tuck a bow under the staple and that adds some movement to the page.

I added a tiny title to one of the popsticks. I had no idea how to make this look like it was burnt into the wood, so I googled a couple of photoshop tutorials which weren’t entirely useful as I work in Elements. It gave me a bit of an idea though and I had a bit of a play to work out what to do. I was quite happy with the effect so at the risk of teaching you to ‘suck eggs’, I’ll share what I did.
1. Zoom in to view the element up close and use the colour picker tool to choose the darkest colour you can find on the popstick and use this colour to write your title (I used a free font “SHARRPE GOTHIK”).
2. Simplify the text layer and duplicate it.
3. Hide the top text layer for now and a apply a Gaussian Blur to the bottom text layer (I used a 5.0 size). Change the blend mode to multiply.
4. Reveal the top text layer and apply a bevel style – Simple Inner. In the layers panel click on the fx symbol and change the direction to down and the size to 5. Change the blend mode to multiply on this layer as well.

So – our Get Inspired Challenge this month is to use either the seed packets or the popsicle stick (or both) in a layout. I had fun playing with these and hope you do too. I will repost my old layout and post my new ones in the Scrapbook Challenges gallery and I hope you will join me there.
Don’t forget that your 100% DD product layout can earn you shopping rewards if you post it in the April Challenge Participation Thread
And don’t worry if you haven’t got those seed packets in your stash, I’ve asked Randy to pop them in the weekly sale this week!
Happy scrapping everyone! Stay home and stay safe!