A couple of years ago i was at a small country village fair in the South of Ireland, and amidst the field of tractors, chicken pens and antique knick-knacks, there was a handful of quaint little craft stalls. Most were selling jewellery and hand carved wooden products, but one little stall caught my eye: an array of brightly coloured felted goods. Handbags, belts pencil cases, placemats… you name it, it was there. As i had already spent most of my money on silly Fun Fair attractions i bought the only thing i could afford – a pen which was covered in blue felt that had a pink and yellow felted flower on the top. Ever since that day i have been fascinated with felted products. I love the vibrancy of the colours and the texture that just begs you to reach out and stroke it. Of course being the crafty person that i am, i wanted to try this new craft technique myself, but unfortunately could not seem to be able to find a retailer that sold the fibers needed for felting. Two years later, during a visit to Brighton, i stumble upon a craft shop that sells fibers, equipment and even a dvd of ‘how to’ instructions – Yipppeeee!!
My first attempt was a heart. A pink heart, felted using needles. It took me half an hour and it looked so cute and sweet, i was very proud of my first felted product. “This would make a perfect scrapbook embellishment”, I said. But Miya had other ideas. “This would make a perfect kitty toy” she said, as she swiped my creation from my hand and tossed it around the room, chasing, hunting and pouncing. Being the opportunist that i am, instead of reaching out to retrieve my embellishment, i reached for my camera.
This layout was inspired by an article in a magazine, in which photos were cut to emphasize lines as a design feature. I loved the idea and wanted to reproduce it using my own style. These pictures were perfect as the photos had a lot of empty space. Normally i would just crop away the empty space so that the photo just focused on the subject. I didn’t want to do that in this instance as all my photos would have been different shapes and sizes in the end, which can sometimes be distracting in a multi photo layout. I made one of my photos slightly larger to act as the focal point and decided not to cut into it like i did for the other three, as this would also make this particular photo stand out as being different. Due to the fact that the photos were quite dark, i placed these on a white background to contrast, and added an ‘embellishment sneeze’ which leads the eye from the top left to the bottom right corner of the page, crossing the path of the focal photo.
I was super pleased with the finished layout as from a design point of view it has good structure and the white space around the edge acts as a border, giving the page definition and balance. But more importantly, see out what Miya thought of this layout here.
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