Taking Themey Papers and Using them on Everyday Pages

I happen to be a big sucker for themey papers that come out. Halloween is always a favorite of mine, just because I know I take lots of photos, and Christmas, I LOVE to use it to make cards, and always have a boat load of photos to scrap. But how many times do you look at themey papers and just think, but I don’t have many Easter photos, or I don’t take pictures are Valentines? So why should I buy themey papers? For this article, I did just that. I took themey papers, and grabbed my most recent stack of printed pictures, all from this summer, and used some of the latest released themey papers.

For these two pages I used the Echo Park Happy Halloween papers to create two totally different pages. The top one is some photos of my kids and nephews that we took at the baseball game we went to in July. I looked at the colors in my nephews shirt and saw it worked perfectly with the colors in the Halloween lines. That is a great way to stretch themey papers: use photos with coordinating colors.

This second page also used the Echo Park Happy Halloween line, the colors of my son’s shirt AND the lighting in the background matched the papers perfectly. This was a photo that was taken while we ate dinner out one night. Now even though the skulls are kinda more Halloween, it works with boy pages. Also I used the haunted house gate sticker, to add some texture on the page as an accent. So: See what patterns match with your photos to coordinate.

This page used the super fun Everybody Loves Christmas line from Echo Park. This line has lots of non traditional colors: pinks, aqua, lime green, and yellows. It made it very easy to create a non themey layout. I even used the Merry sticker for my title “Merry Smiles” and the “Joy” sticker to add onto my page for fun accents. So don’t be afraid to USE some of the themey embellies and just add them onto your page.

Now this line was probably the hardest to not create a themey page, since I used the VERY traditional Merry Christmas line from Echo Park. I choose to just stick with the reds and browns, instead of adding too much green, so my page didn’t look too Christmas related. The photo is one of the kids at a miniature golf park, but I love the browns and how they add lots of richness on the page. I even used the snowflake paper to make a ribbon pleat, but you can hardly tell with a non themey page, that’s what I used. The circle with the wording “4ever” is actually an ornament without the ornament top showing on it.

I even created two Happy Birthday cards with the left over scraps from the two Christmas lines that I used. Both cards have themey elements, but don’t have an overall themey feel to them, so they can be used for just about any occasion. The snowflake on the bottom one can be pulled off as just a flower accent, and the top card just has a rich color feel about it, instead of screaming holidays and Christmas.

So, next time you see those themey lines, just remember, you can always stretch your papers and embellies and use them for more than just holiday pages and cards.
Have fun creating..
Wendi Robinson