It took me way too long to get this page done. I spent all afternoon plus a bit more time in the evening to finish it, and it's not even a very involved design. At two point, I considered putting it away and revising later, but I kept going and I'm actually pleased with the end result, which I was originally dubious would be the case.
Those pictures were taken at Universal Studios. They are the London street you see when you exit King Cross' station after your ride on the Hogwarts Express. This is supposed to be Grimmauld Place. My two-year-old niece kept playing with the doorknob and trying to open the door and we gently explained to her that those doors were just decorative and didn't open. Or so we thought, as not even two minutes later, one of the door opened and someone from the Universal Studios staff came out, to our biggest surprise. Made us look like a bunch of liars in front of my niece!
I knew I wanted to use the Open House dies from Spellbinders to mirror the door from the pictures. Those dies have been sitting in my stash for a few months now, waiting to be used, and they were perfect for this page. When I sat down to start the page, I put Tim Holtz's Live in the background, which focused on alcohol inks. I have never worked with those, but the video reminded me that I did purchase some beautiful papers from Craft Consortium with full backgrounds printed to look like alcohol ink creations. I wondered if they would work for my page background... They totally did, and I was liking how the blueish grey page I picked was meshing well with the color of the staircase.
I also pulled out some Harry Potter-themed papers from Paper House and played with a few pieces and cut-aparts to see what my design could look like. I wrote down my journaling to see how much space I'd need to keep with it and then I tried to think of my title as well. I probably changed my mind three or four times on which title to use and finally settled on "Behind door 11". I've mentioned in the past that French uses a boatload of the letter E and I'm always trying to be mindful not to deplete my E's too quickly when using sticker collections or else they quickly become unusable. This was the case with the word "derrière", which uses 3 E's and 3 R's. Ouch! So I started with the number 11 and used the Big Letters dies from Stampin' Up! with gold foil sheets. I then proceeded to add the word door with stickers but found that most of my stickers were too short and didn't balance the size of the number well, so I pulled the Society Bigz alphabet die from Tim Holtz and cut the letters I needed out of black glossy paper. The next word was created out of Midnight Thickers. And then I was left to add that word with way too much repeat letters. I tried a sticker pack I had many multiples off, but I quickly realized it was not going to fit. So I dug through my alphabet stamps and tried to see if I could stamp on the grey background only and not get to the darker circle, but before I did, I spotted a really, really old sticker set (says 2003 on the packaging) that was the right size and had enough letters, so I gave this a try and it solves my problem very nicely.
The top of the page was pretty bare, though, so I looked through my Harry Potter stickers and cut-aparts and layered a few elements to fill the space. I added the little feet and feather at the bottom over the cut-apart and I stamped the date on the bottom step.
To tie in with the title and the pictures, I looked through my dies to see if I had any numbers that would be small enough to add the number 11 to my die-cut door and the Alphanumeric Label dies from Tim Holtz were just the perfect size. I used the gold foil sheets again and added the number at the top of the door, where I had more space to glue the numbers flat.
Then I used my T-ruler to add lines at the bottom of the page and handwrite my journaling. This is such a relief to be finally done with this page and have one more ready to add to my Orlando trip album.
Supplies
Stamps: Project Life Une date (Stampin' Up!)
Cardstock: Basic Black, Basic Grey, Vellum, Gold and Black Foil Sheets (Stampin' Up!);
Fog (Lawn Fawn)
Patterned Papers: Wizarding World (Paper House);
Ink Drops - Dusk (Paper Consortium)
Ink: Night of Navy (Stampin' Up!)
Dies: Alphanumeric Label, Society Alphabet Bigz (Tim Holtz for Sizzix); Circle Layering (Tonic)
Open House Door Base, Open House Sentiment Steps, Open House Door Side Panel (Spellbinders);
Large Numbers (Stampin' Up!)
Stickers: Alphabitties (Provocraft); Midnight Thickers (American Crafts);
Wizarding World (Paper House)
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