Scrapbook Friday - Layout 9

Today we are talking about preface pages. If you need them and why they sometimes make sense. First off, do you need them? No you don't. Well that was easy right? So let's move on to the next topic ;-) Not so fast, just because you don't need them doesn't mean we can't talk about them right?

I think sometimes such an intro page can be helpful to define your book and the story you want to tell. For example, out trip to Canada included Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec. Since all major cities look a bit alike it makes sense to show someone who didn't went with us on this trip which city we are visiting on the next pages.

I also often encounter a way simpler problem. I have a few more pictures left that I really want to incorporate but they don't fit into any of the pages I created. So I like to take these few pictures and create a preface page with them.

In my case I got super lucky. Thanks to an upcoming Canada Day, Cricut had some free Canada cuttings which I used here:

I used "Ruby" cardstock from Close To My Heart and cut the Canada Map in the upper left corner of my sheet. Yes, with the Cricut you can place the object just were you want it to go. I removed the cardstock from the sticky mat after the cutting was done. It left behind the cut outs which I thought make another great page.

Similar to the technique with the title letters that I explained in last week’s post, I carefully placed the map part on white cardstock and hold it in place with some washi tape. Piece by piece I took the cut outs from the sticky mat and placed them back into the frame.

This time I positioned the map in the lower right corner of the cardstock. Ones all pieces were glued down I removed the template. I cut about 1/4" on the right and bottom off and adhered it to a second sheet of white cardstock. So I used the positive and negative of this cutting to create the base for two of my preface pages.
I also cut three city titles for my pages and I picked 3-5 pictures from each city to go along with the rest. Here are the pictures uncut that I chose:

Cutting a title is easy, but I wanted a shadow for each to have them stand out from the page. The font that I picked didn't came with a shadow, but that's not a problem. I used the following technique to make my own shadows for each title. First I cut the words Ottawa, Montreal and Quebec three times. Each one from black and ruby cardstock and one more time from a white/gold paper I had left. You can see all three layers here on the first page before I adhered them together.

My plan was to layer the titles first the black, then the white and then the red. Well with a red background that title wouldn't show right? So I layered all three different. You might say "But wait, they are all cut at the same size, so how do you get a shadow effect then?". Correct, all three are cut the same size and when I adhered them together I simply moved them a bit off to the side, showing just a bit of the color underneath. I added a few detailed pictures here so you can see more clearly what I did with the titles.

All that is left now is to cut down my extra pictures and arrange them with the pages and titles. I cut the pictures to about 3"x4" more or less. I think they turned out pretty nice. What do you think? This is an easy way to structure you pages a bit and add some photos that you really like but don't fit anywhere else ;-)

Instead of creating individual preface pages, you can use this technique to create your intro page for the whole story. Take some of your favorite shots of the event you are scraping and combine them on your very first page. This way everyone looking through your book gets a glimpse of what is inside.

Well, this was a long tutorial this week but I hope you enjoyed it. See you next week....