Artbooking Made Easy: Christmas Layouts

Happy holidays! This time of year is most definitely the most wonderful of them all, and I heartily wish each and every one of you the best in all your comings and goings. Make warm memories, share your own love for family and friends, and keep the photos of all the festivities for a holiday scrapbooking hullabaloo  or two in the near future.

Documenting photos from the same event every year can seem repetitive, but new memories deserve their own place in your family history. So how to brighten up old traditions on the pages of your scrapbooks? Add some cheer with the Cricut® Artbooking cartridge holiday-themed keys (pages 74 and 75 of your booklet)! For a peek at what they can do, watch this video. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone you’re opening this gift early.



Let’s take a closer look at a few features of these yuletide treasures together.

On the Merry & Bright layout, we see some fabulous color coordination. Perhaps black isn’t the first color you think of to use on a layout highlighting Christmas, but it is very classy and appropriate here. It weaves throughout the piece, including the photos themselves and in several embellishments.

Perhaps the most masterful technique used here is subtlety, because it contrasts so nicely with a few very bold features, and that makes this layout beautiful both from afar and upon close inspection. Did you notice some ProPlayer B&T Duos™ paper was used? It fits in so nicely here because it is a red shade with a very unobvious pattern; you would never guess it came from a packet with a little boy theme. Remember also the delicate mask on the base pages you saw in the video is effectively faint.

The bold contrast makes an appearance in all the pieces of this layout that have texture, and there are several to see. The first snippet of texture the eye notices is the glitter paper, and then onward to the black Shimmer trim. Notice also that the Slate satin polka-dot ribbon has a sheen that is less obvious than the glitz of the first two, and includes a pattern. With the added sparkles, sequins, and sanding texture of the photo mats, it would seem that so much movement would overwhelm the page. But its fine balance makes it not so.

The Happy Holidays layout makes great use of the Cricut® cuts from the Artbooking cartridge. Notice the Crystal Blue border at the bottom of the layout. Found on page 74 of the booklet, this border could be cut at a much smaller size in White Daisy paper, flipped upside down from how you see it here, and made to look like snowy garland on a Christmas tree shape.

This layout is a wonderful example of effectively using negative space. The strings of the ornaments that are covered in washi tape, the open space behind the ribbon on the photo mats filled with cardstock, and the negative spaces in the ornaments being filled with color rather than the forefront are all pieces that normally wouldn’t get attention. This is a great way to use up scrap paper! Alternatively, you can keep your Artbooking cartridge handy and cut out the same shape twice in different colors to be able to match up shapes exactly, either as backing or as topping, so different aspects of each are the focal point. Or how about an experiment in cutting the shape just barely smaller in a contrasting color so as to lay them atop the existing ones? That would leave a small border around each ornament and make them pop. Wouldn’t that be darling?

The holiday layouts you can make with the Artbooking keys and a number of twinkling embellishments are bound to make your scrapbooks holly and jolly. If you’re interested in receiving your own free Cricut® Artbooking collection, leave a comment here telling me what your favorite holiday tradition is. I’ll check the list twice and then randomly select a winner to be announced on my Artbooking Made Easy post in two weeks! Until then, have yourself a merry little time scrapbooking holiday layouts!

Recipes:
12" x 12" Merry & Bright Layout
Z1906 Cricut® Artbooking Collection
B1416 My Acrylix™ Keyboard Uppercase
C1469 My Acrylix™ December 25th
X7172B ProPlayer Paper Packet
Z1829 Black & Grey Glitter Paper
Z1802 Slate Satin Polka-Dot Ribbon
Z1809 Black Shimmer Trim
Z1862 Mini-Medly Accents Black Collection
Z1752 Sparkles Clear Assortment
Z1701 Baker’s Twine Neutral Assortment
Colors: Whisper, Slate, Ruby, White Daisy, Juniper, Black

12" x 12" Happy Holidays Layout
Z1906 Cricut® Artbooking Collection
C1567 My Acrylix™ Santa Claus
X7175B Frosted Paper Packet
Z1829 Black & Grey Glitter Paper
Z1907 Sparkle & Shine Washi Tape 3-Pack
Colors: Bamboo, Colonial White, Crystal Blue, Ruby, Twilight, Whisper