Photo tray FUN!!

We've all seen the beautiful photo trays from various companies like Tim Holtz, 7 Gyspies and more.  Well, I've had one sitting around for awhile and I finally decided to give it a go and make one!

I used Teresa's beautiful Christmas Home line for this project and I LOVE how it turned out!  I decided to focus it on our three daughters and print out black and white pictures so that they would compliment the colors in this line.

At first I got out all my "Christmas Home" papers and embellishments and decided on what papers looked best together.  I always try to repeat patterns to give it a cohesive design, so you will notice I repeated the red and green papers by putting them "catty-corner" to each other.  I also found a GREAT quote online that I wanted to incorporate into my photo tray that applies to my daughters' lives and I think that's always a good idea to have a theme or statement intertwined into your design.

Next I gathered all my embellishments and played around with the design layout of each section until I liked how it looked.  I wanted my photos to "pop" out of the tray so I decided to have them overlay the sections of the tray and create a visual "triangle" in the middle of the whole project.  The triangle is pleasing to our eyes and gives our eyes an easy way to "move" through the design.  So I matted each photo and adheres some pop dots to the back of each photo to raise them up to the level of the wood sections in the photo tray.

Then it was just a matter of playing with the ribbons, flowers and trims until I told myself to stop! lol... I have a hard time knowing when to stop "fussing" with a design!  A good tip with that is to take a photo with your phone or camera and take a look at it.  Sometimes I see my design much more clearly if I see it through the "lens"...  

I made the green flower down at the bottom of the photo tray with some "bloomers" from Webster's Pages that I simply gathered into a circle and placed a vintage pearl brooch in the middle of.  Then I trimmed some red ribbon, glued that to the bottom of the tray and added the flower on top!

Adding some finishing touches to the top of the tray and the trim around the edge of the tray make the look complete and ready to display in my home!

I don't know if you can notice, but I decided to make this project "generic" enough to display all year long!  Because I have the red & green elements from the Noel line it definitely has the Christmas feel to it, but I made a point of not adding any "obvious" Christmas embellishments so that if I wanted to display this year round, I could!  

And here it is in my home right now:

This was a GREAT project to design and something I think anyone would have FUN making!  These are also great gifts for the Holidays to make for family and friends and an easy way to use some of that "stash" of miscellaneous scrappiness we've been hoarding for a while!  :)

I hope you enjoyed this project and come back to see all the wonderful CREATIONS by the lovely DT ladies this month!

Have a GREAT week,

http://akissonthechic.typepad.com/laura_mccollough_scrapboo/