Superhero Layout

Hey peeps! To start off today's post I want to make two apologies. 

The first, is that I am sorry my previous posts this week have been so short. For some reason this week I have been feeling majorly uninspired and living too much in my head, which makes for bad blog posts. I recently received my first bit of constructive criticism about my blog posts, I was told that at times it reads as dry and boring – I need to add more of my own personality into each post. Of course this has led me to overthink every word that I write and question whether or not I'm being funny. I've come to the realization that I must be "accidentally funny" because when I try it comes off as forced an unbelieveing. So I now have something (else) to work on. 

The second apology that I need to make is that this post is a day late, I had it done in plenty of time to upload but last night I suffered from a major headache and actually went to bed really early. I don't know if it was due to my "lack of sleep" the night before (I went to bed, woke up two hours later and couldn't get back to sleep, I have sleeping issues – don't judge lol) or if it was the fact that my back has been hurting and I'm too chicken to get a massage or to see chiropractor. I hope you all can forgive me. 

Now enough of this rambling, let's get to the layout. As the title says this week is a superhero themed double page layout. Last June, my niece celebrated her fourth birthday with a superhero themed party. She absolutely loves Wonder Woman and looked adorable in her costume. I went through the photos that I had from the party and I knew that I wanted to put a lot of them on this layout. That is why this layout features six 4 x 6 photo mats and one 4 x 4.

Since I wanted the focus of this layout to be about the pictures I tried to keep the design pretty minimal. I used to Cricut Plantin Schoolbook to cut the cityscape (this is one of my favorite cuts from the entire cartridge, I've used it many times) and I cut it using the "fit to page" feature on my expression. Even at the maximum size the city will not cut the entire length that you will need it, it is about a quarter of an inch short. I'll tell you how I fix this problem soon. 

I used the Cricut Create a Friend cartridge to cut my super hero girl. The actual cut is a Super boy but because so many elements of this cartridge are interchangeable I was able to simply find another hairstyle and turned the boy hero into a girl hero. I cut her out at 6 inches so that she could be the major focal point of the page. Just a little sidenote, if you're familiar with the cartridge you'll know that I added a little red piece around the neck to simulate the tie from the Cape, not only does it add a little bit of uniqueness to the character but it was also to hide one of my own mistakes. As I was adding glue to the body during assembly I almost tore our hero's neck off and didn't want to recut the entire thing. So by cutting a tiny piece of red card stock and adding it to that area I was able to mask the fact that I almost decapitated my focal point.

Now, since the birthday girl dressed as Wonder Woman, I wanted to stick with those colors throughout the layout (Plus, most superheroes share the same color combos anyway – red, white, blue and gold). The pattern papers actually came from a patriotic themed paper pad from Pebbles called Americana. Although you can't see it very well, there is a piece of gold(ish) cardstock that separates the red and blue pattern papers and it is punched using the Fiskar's Upper Crest border punch. I did this to mimic wonder woman costume which is a red top, a blue skirt and a golden belt. 

I mentioned above that the cityscape cuts just shy of the length that you need it, to solve this problem I grabbed a punch from American Crafts called Scalloped Star (it is one of the knockout punches and a part of a Christmas set of six different punches – I got it on sale at Tuesday Morning a while ago ) and I added it to the edges to cover the gap. 

To finish up the page I went through my bin of Thickers and other alphas (man is that bin scary, I just may have too many alphabet stickers LOL, but you just have to have one in every color right?) and i found that I had the same font (freedom-which is kind of fitting if you think about it) in both a red and a blue. 

Lastly, because I hate blank space, I went into my sticker/die-cut/other randomness bin and found a package of superhero themed diecuts from Recollection. I cut apart one of the frames in the pack to get the sentiment "Super Hero" and added it to a red "burst" that was also included. 

I hope you all like it and found this post to be both informative and "less dry and boring". If you have any feedback I would love for you to tell me by posting in the comments. I hope you have a fantastic weekend and I will see you back Monday with the conclusion to our Christmas 2015 card flashback.