Guest Gina Huminski (GinaBeth1) : Melding Old and New

Hi everyone, Tiffany here to introduce a guest blogger today. Her name is Gina Huminski, but you may know her as GinaBeth. She is one of my very favorite people to watch on YouTube, and she never fails to inspire me. I have always loved the way she uses her stash, mixes product, and follows the rule to do what looks right to your own eye. I was so excited when she agreed to do a post for us!

You can find more of her work on her blog and her YouTube channel.

  Tiffany O'Grady
   Creative Team Member of SCRAP YOUR SCRAPS 

I think any time someone approaches you and asks you to share your work with a group of their readers, it can be a very humbling experience and yet also terrifying.  When Tiffany asked if I would like to contribute a blog post to this blog, I was over the moon excited, but at the same time, wondered what I would like to share.  Tiffany gave me total control over the content, but she did mention something to me that stuck.  She said that one of the things she likes most about my scrapbooking is my ability to meld old and new product.  As I thought about this over the last few weeks, I started to wonder why that would be something that someone would notice.  Here are my tips if this is something you struggle with:

1.  Don’t keep up with the Joneses.  We all look at the layouts that are posted in the social groups to which we belong and we all have that one scrapbooker that we wish we could be.  His or her layouts are always inspiring and something that we would like to achieve.  Let me be the first to tell you, that’s okay, but let me also tell you that just doing your own thing is okay, too.  These are your memories that you are preserving.  You don’t need anyone’s approval on how you do it.  The great thing about scrapbooking is that it’s all about you; there are no rules.  So feel free to put whatever you want on your page, try whatever technique caught your eye because at the end of the day, the only person who can turn a critical eye to your work is you.  So if you like it, embrace it and move on to the next page.  It’s only paper!

2.  Don’t keep track of trends.  When we look back on our memories twenty years from now, we’re not going to remember that during the Summer of 2014 every one was into watercoloring or that enamel dots were the hot thing or that gold was everywhere.  We’re going to see pictures; we’re going to read journaling and we’re going to remember those stories.  So if you want to meld your old product with your new, remember, that trends come and trends go and sure enough, they also come back.  Has every one noticed the reprisal of tear bears?  I rest my case.  It really goes back to what I stated in point #1.  Do what makes you happy.

3.  Put your supplies away.  One of the reasons why I don’t realize that I’m mixing old and new products is that I don’t keep track of what is old and what is new.  I order new stuff and I put it away so that when I’m in the middle of a page and I think to myself, ‘oh, I need one of X’, I know where it’s located.  Whether I pick something that I bought last week or something that I bought three years ago doesn't matter.  If it fits on the page, I use it.

So that’s my three thoughts on melding our old and new product.  Let me share with you now the layout that I made for this blog post.

When I began to think about this concept of using old and new, I started to look around my room at all of the supplies that I have amassed over the years.  I decided right away that I would do a monochromatic layout.  It’s much easier to pull supplies that way.  This was a departure from my normal process.  Typically, I start with the pictures, but this project was more about the supplies, so I started there.  I decided that I don’t scrapbook with the color purple very much, so I would try to do a monochromatic layout in purple.  I pulled all of the supplies I thought I might want to use.  Again, since all of my supplies are put away regardless of their age, I didn’t know that I pulled a set of brads from 2005 and a set from 2014.  I didn’t end up using any of brads – but this is what my supply set looked like to start.

Next it was time to find some pictures that might go with this purple theme.  I have a large stack of photos from the beginning of 2014 already printed.  I searched through those and found this photos of our night attending Cirque Ziva.  The pictures had purple in them.  I was on my way.

Then, I began to think about new.  I had a lot of supplies next to me, but in looking at the rhinestone and glitter flowers, the brads, the eyelets, and all the rest, none of it screamed new.  So if my supplies aren’t new, then I would embrace a technique that is very popular right now.

Using a Heidi Swapp stencil, some Pearl Mica Flake medium from Ranger, and a sheet of Glitz pattern paper from 2009, I created my background.

Following that, it was time to figure out where the pictures were going to go, find a place for my title, determine what my journaling was going to say and where, and then embellish.

Using the older supplies and the newer technique, this is the final product.  I absolutely love it. 

The title is made from old Heidi Swapp Alphabets called Schizophrenic in Lilac.  They were released in 2005.  I didn’t like the light color of them so I colored over them with my Wink of Stella brush pen in violet.  The rhinestone and glitter flowers are just from my stash as is the large flower.  That flower came in a kit many years ago.  I added some puffy hearts that are more recent from Freckled Fawn along with some metal hearts from this year.  They are by My Mind’s Eye, Necessities collection in metallic.  The doily I purchased from a shop on Etsy.  As the finishing touch, I took a page out of Nancy’s (kittyscrapper) playbook and used phrase stamps from Amy Tangerine, Dear Lizzy and October Afternoon to finish off the layout.  The journaling was done using a Staedtler Triplus Finepoint marker.

I hope that through sharing this, you have been even a little bit inspired to get to your workspace and start capturing your memories.

Take care and thanks again ladies for inviting me to contribute.  Gina