Guest Designer | Cathy Sanders

#couturecreationsaus #ultimatecrafts

It's such a privilege to be asked to be a guest designer for Couture Creations this month.

My name is Cathy Sanders and I hale from sunny South Africa. I am wife to Keith and mother to Aaron. I've been scrapping since 2003 and am totally addicted. You can see lots more of my creations on my blog 

I had fun creating layouts with the new Sea Breeze collection, especially stretching myself to see the collection as more than just pretty paper, but as a means to embellish a page and add to the memory.


For my first layout I didn't want to go too traditional on the beach theme, yet I still wanted to create the rustic feel, so chose to use the green knots paper (back of Sea Collection: Beauty) with a subtle strip of the blue check (back of Sea Collection:Seahorse & Gingham) for the foundation of my page. Once the photos were decided on and printed, they were all mounted on the blue side of "Secrets of the Ocean" paper .

I then decided that the page needed just a little something extra.... and so began a two day experiment (and drama) of how to cut a stamp with my cutting machine... well in the end I designed a simple compass and cut it out of craft foam. Once cut, I ran it through my StickerMaker and then attached it to an acrylic block.... unbeknownst to me, I put it upside down.Thankfully I had test stamped it first on a scrap piece and discovered this. So peeled off the letters, found some foam ones in my stash and adapted my stamp.... happy days. I stamped the compass at an angle and half off the page just for a bit of extra effect and rustic feel.


The next corner of my page to get a treatment, was the bottom right. For this I used the Netting and the card that it is packaged on. I cut the card to be the same size as my photos on the right... a 3x4" rectangle. I then pulled off the front of the board to distress it and ran my inkpad all over it too.... made it all inky and brown.

This card as well as two of the cards off the "Caught in the Wind" sheet, finished off the block of photos on the right page.

To create the netted corner, I simply took the whole bundle of white netting and snip snip here and there close to the knots till I had a strip of about 10cm off the top. I then lay this over the page and snipped and gathered till it looked right. I tucked some shells from the Ephemera pack behind the net and then applied glue to each knot to attached the net to the page.

For the anchor, I fussy-cut around the anchor on the "Bottom of the Sea" page and then simple tucked it into the netting. Here is a closeup for a bit more detail.


The last embellishment I added to the page was the bunting across the top. These are already pre-cut in the ephmera pack. There were enough of each them to alternate each pattern across the top of the layout. I again just snipped a few strands of the netting to make a long single knotted strand which I glued across the top of the flags.


For my journaling strip, I typed this out on my computer and printed it on plain white card which I then inked in a few different shades of green, blue and brown before attaching to my page.

I finished off the layout with a few ink splats scatted around.

Products used:
White Cardstock








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