May 2012 flickr Friends Reveal : Flowers

Posted on May 31, 2012 by admin

Here we are on the last day of May which can only mean one thing – we have another round of flickr Friends to reveal!

Each month, we provide a theme for you to use on your projects and then upload to our flickr pool. At the end of each month, we select a few of our favorites to post here on our blog and send them some BasjcGrey goodies as our way of saying thanks.

The theme for this month was “flowers”. As they always say, April showers bring May flowers and we loved seeing our flickr pool bloom with your projects!

Without further ado, some of our favorites from our flickr pool using this month’s theme :

We loved the combination of super colorful chevron and neutral flowers on this layout utilizing many of the B sides of our Picadilly collection.

A beautiful and vibrant card created using one of our stamp sets. The best part? The pop up flowers that are revealed when the recipient opens the card!

Last but not least, this large floral pattern created with our PB&J collection reminds us of a beautiful quilt pattern. An absolutely stunning example of paper piecing!

A BIG thank you to all of you who uploaded your projects – we love being able to feature your work here on the BG blog. Winners keep an eye on your flickr mail as we’ll be in touch shortly to arrange your prizes. Look for June’s theme to be posted tomorrow!

Product Spotlight : Brads

Posted on May 30, 2012 by admin

Sea Watch | Nicole Samuels

I’ve always had a thing for BasicGrey brads. They come is such gorgeous colors and the fabric ones especially have the most beautiful and inspiring designs. I like to really let them stand out on my pages…they’re too pretty to just use as a functional fastener!

There’s so many ways to do this but one of my favorite techniques is to incorporate them into the title somehow. For this layout I decided to make my own “a” for the word “sea” by using the lovely fish design brad as the circle part of the letter and then add a die cut “arm” to finish it off. Stitching some orange floss in circles around the brad made it stand out even more.

So think outside the brad…er, box… and come up with some new ways to let those brads shine!

Think Technique : Origami

Posted on May 29, 2012 by admin

Origami | Yohko Takiguchi

I want to share two layouts where I have included “Origami”. Origami is one of the traditional Japanese arts. It is the art of folding a sheet of paper into various figures such as birds, animals and many other things.

I created a big butterfly by folding two square sheets of paper and tying up them with a pipe cleaner. This is the folding diagram for the butterfly.

Ninja | Yohko Takiguchi

I added origami “shuriken” to this layout. The Japanese shuriken is better known as a ninja star. Shuriken is a throwing knife used by Ninja, a secret agent in Japanese feudal period. The origami shuriken is a true classic and a famous origami design.

Here is the folding diagram for shuriken. This diagram came from Japanese origami artist Fumiaki Shingu’s origami site, ORIGAMI CLUB. You can find many folding diagrams in this site. Be careful not to use cardstock, which is too thick for most origami projects. So the original shuriken diagram was modified slightly because of use of papers for scrapbooking.

Basic Scrapbook Sketch : 5.28.12

Posted on May 28, 2012 by admin

Face A La Mer | Marinette Lesne

Hello, BG fans! This week we’re providing you a sketch to jump start your next project based on this gorgeous layout by BasicGrey design team member Marinette Lesne.

Marinette says, “The inspiration of my layout come from my photo. My son Quentin from the back watching the beach. I converted my photo in B&W because I wanted to keep all the sweetness that comes from it.. and the soft colors of “What’s up” collection is very perfect to match with it. I wanted a dynamic sketch so I added circles on my layout. The sweetness is also provided by the little circles of vellum transparent.”

This sketch uses a single photo, but feel free to change things up to work for you! What about using the circle elements to include smaller photos? The decision is up to you.

We’d love to see what you create from this week’s sketch. Leave a comment below with a link to your project and we’ll select one comment at random to receive a $10 gift certificate to shop at basicgrey.com. Comment must be posted by June 3, 2012 at 11:59p MST.

If you upload your layout to your blog or online gallery, we hope you’ll also upload it to our BasicGrey flickr pool and note what products you’ve used so that other BG fans can find inspiration from your work easily.