If you have noticed from looking at most my projects that I have posted here in this blog, I love to incorporate patterned paper into my layouts, cards and altered projects. So you can imagine my interest when I saw that Ali Edwards was coming out with a new book, A Designer’s Eye for Scrapbooking with Patterned Paper. One of my favorite scrapbookers with a new book on using patterned paper!
Now that I have the book, I would like to share what you can expect to learn from the book.
The book is divided into 6 different chapters. Each chapter focuses on a different common pattern in paper such as circles, stripes and florals, geometric and text. The final chapter in the book contains challenges for the reader to try out at home.
The layouts in this book make it a great source for useable ideas. The ideas are very inspiring and in most cases they are more on the simple side of design. I think this makes it easier for the reader to “scraplift” the ideas in the book because they are not too complicated.
This is also a great reference book because of the bottom of each page there is a sketch showing the layout of all of the patterned paper on the page. Some of the layouts only use one patterned paper and other layouts combine different patterned papers. Ali shares ideas on how to combine different patterned papers to create a cohesive layout. The sketches show you where each different type of paper was in the layout.
These sketches are my favorite part of the book because it gives the reader a starting point for their layouts, but leaves the creativity of color choice and embellishment placement up to the creator. You can of course take color and embellishment elements for the example layout for the sketch if you would rather do that.
As fun bonus, the back of the book contains 8 pieces of patterned paper that were designed by Ali for you to cut out and use on your layouts.
I recommend this book for beginners because it gives a nice explanation of basic design principles and it is also great for more advance scrapbookers because of the inspiring layouts and sketches.