Scrappin' from A to Z with MyMemories Designer Kathryn Estry!

Hi!  I'm Kathryn Estry, a designer here at MyMemories, and I'm back with another episode of From A to Z.  My goal is to give you so many ideas that you'll never be at a loss as to what to scrap or how to make your pages look amazing. Luckily for me, I have a brilliant Creative Team, and the inspiration layouts I use in this series were made by the talented ladies on my team.

I'm hoping you'll see some things in today's post that you want to try!  If you do take any of these ideas and run with them, I'd love to see your layouts!  Please post them in the MyMemories forum in this month's A to Z Challenge thread HERE.  Everyone who posts a layout here this month will receive a new product from me that's not even in my store yet!

Did you see my last blog post about the letter A?  If you missed it, you'll want to look back through the blog for ideas for Action, Angles, and Arrows. Check it out HERE!

So, on to B ~ Boys, Brackets, and Butterflies!

BOYS:

I'm not sure which I like better for boys, my collections or the pages my talented CT ladies made with them.  I'm showing you pages with little boys, but you can make some wonderful pages, too, with teenagers and the men in your life.

Look at these precious photos of Kabra's little boy.  She's so right!  You "gotta love him!"  what I like about this layout are the expressions on his face and variety of perspective in her photos.  Plus, it's just so cute and colorful, you keep looking at it.  Notice what he's wearing. The colors of his shirt match the kit so well that the page has a truely cohesive look.  The neutral backgrounds are perfect, too! She used In A Cuckoo House available HERE!

Kathy scrapped this adorable page for her grandson using Natural Beauty.  It's what this blog post is all about, "B is for Boy."  She's used arrows (my A blog post), too.  I just love the pages Kathy makes for her grandkids with the sweet closeups.  Try coming up really close and capturing your kids as Kathy does.  Another feature she uses in this layout that you could try is the layering of papers under the photo.  (Oops.  That's another blog post.)

BRACKETS:

I make it easy for you to use brackets as I include them with some of my design collections.  For Kindergarten Kisses and Night Owl, I've made super fancy brackets embellished with matching elements from the page kit.

The next page I'm sharing has two of my B words from today, boy AND brackets.  Yvonne used my Kindergarten Kisses collection for this oh, so cute page.  I LOVE his expression and body language.  It's as if he's saying, "I'm ready for kindergarten - maybe."  So cute!  The brackets and the frame behind him are a great way to frame his little face.

  

Note about Kindergarten Kisses ~ This page kit is good for all elementary grades as well as kindergarten.

Judith's pretty page below shows another way to use a bracket for a frame.  She used my already-embellished bracket from the Night Owl Bracket Pack along with a frame from the extra Frame Pack, the letter M, and extra embellishments from the page kit, and she's made a simple, but beautiful layout.

One more bracket example is from Kathy, using my May Scraps collection.  I wanted to include this one here because of the simplicity and the sweet closeup faces.  You could easily make a page like this one, couldn't you?  This page and Judith's (above) are good examples of not filling up the page.  It's fine to leave some of the background paper showing. I'll talk about "white space" in another post.

BUTTERFLIES:

On many scrapped pages, you'll see hearts and flowers.  Don't forget about butterflies!  They can work in so many layouts, and you'll often find them in my page kits.  One in particular that has a lot of butterflies is Natural Beauty (shown above).  Both Liz and Yvonne have made really pretty pages with butterflies.  Liz has little butterflies all around the photos with action shots (see A-Action post).  Yvonne shows off a beautiful photo of a butterfly on her page.

MY FAVORITE:

All American Boy tied as my favorite A design collection, so I'm taking the liberty of using it here for B.  :)  It's such a perfect kit for boys, young and old.  If you have photos of your husband or brother or dad as a little boy, how special a page with this kit would be!

I just love this layout by Anita because she used a black and white photo and clustered a lot of the little boyish elements around him.  The photo has an old-fashioned look which goes perfectly with the boy toys of the past in All American Boy.

I hope you've found some new things to try, and again, I invite you to visit my forum challenge, Scrapping with Kathryn from A to Z.  :)