Sweet Shoppe Designs – The Sweetest Digital Scrapbooking Site on the Web

The Sweet Shoppe is excited to announce yet another new addition to our team of talented designers! Earlier this month, Cheryl of Fiddle-Dee-Dee Designs made her debut in the Shoppe with some of her absolutely gorgeous cluster-riffic layered templates.

To celebrate Cheryl’s debut, we decided to use one of her templates for this month’s edition of One Template, Eight Ways – where we give eight of our Sugar Babes the same template and challenge them to show us just how versatile a layered template can be.

We all started with this template from Fiddle-Dee-Dee’s recently released The Beauty of Our Lives:

This 12×12 template has space for one large landscape photo and three smaller square photos. There’s space for a title, two small journaling labels, and a label for the date. The page design centers around two sets of parallel paper strips that draw the eye across the page as well as a large element cluster made up of foliage, flowers, string, ribbon, and circular elements that helps tie the photo block and journaling label together.

We gave this template to eight of our Sugar Babes, and they created some truly gorgeous layouts! They all achieved a unique look by not only using different digital scrapbooking kits, but by taking different approaches to using the template itself. Take a look:

Sherly took a straightforward approach and used the template as-is. She clipped 4 different photos to the photo masks, clipped a variety of patterned papers to the background and paper strips, and replaced the cluster’s element layers with a variety of flowers, foliage, and word art. What a gorgeous travel page!

Jacinda opted to simplify the template by removing many of the paint and cluster element layers. By hiding these layers and focusing on the photos, she was able to then add back in just a few flowers, foliage, and decorative elements to accent her page. I love the way she used those paper strips for her journaling!

I decided to use the four photo blocks to subdivide a single photograph. To make this work given the composition of the original photo, I rotated the template’s canvas 180 degrees. I like the way it showcases one image of me photographing my friends on the beach, but separates me and them into the different photo blocks, helping to tell the story I wanted to record. You’ll also note that I replaced the hexagonal shape with a circular photo lens and in place of a few of the flower layers, I use viewfinder photo wheels instead.

No photos? No worries! Jill used the same template to create a gorgeous photoless layout. She did this by clipping journaling cards to the four photo masks and building her element clusters from the coordinating kits. What a fun way to use this template!

Sweet Shoppe Designer Wendy of WendyP Designs wanted to get in on the fun this month, and she used the template to create a journaling-heavy layout. Wendy did this by using the large landscape photo mask as a place for her journaling, and kept her photos clipped to those smaller blocks. Just because the template doesn’t have a lot of space allocated for journaling doesn’t mean you can’t use it this way!

Amie’s spin on this template is a literal one: she rotated the template’s canvas 90 degrees counter-clockwise. That gave her a large portrait-oriented photo block which worked best for the images she was wanting to scrapbook. Looks like she and her friends had a crazy fun evening, and those sideways journaling blocks and word art fit the craziness of their evening beautifully!

Mary had four square-shaped photographs to scrapbook, rather than the 3 square and 1 landscape the template came designed for. But that didn’t stop her! She changed the large landscape photo mat into a square one and added a set of sun rays from the kit to center on and highlight that photograph. It balanced out her page against those absolutely gorgeous element clusters she created, and I love the way she layered the ship’s steering wheel between the smaller photos. Expertly done!

Judie gives us our eighth and final take on this layout with her single photo scrapbook page. Notice how she replaced the three smaller photo blocks with elements from the digital kit she was working with: a bird and cage, a small journaling card, and a stack of multimedia elements with a binder clip. The end result is a well-balanced and beautifully designed page that reminds us just because the template shows a photo mask in a specific spot doesn’t mean you have to use a photo there.

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If you’ve been on the fence about using layered page templates for your next scrapbook layout, thinking they lock you in and limit your options, hopefully this post has changed your mind. Layered templates can be used in so many different ways, and provide a great starting point for a beautiful, finished scrapbook layout.

So grab a template, pick out a kit, and get creative! Whether you rotate or flip the template, simplify it by removing layers and elements, turn a photo block into a journaling space or a place to feature an element from a kit, or even go completely photoless, the sky is the limit when you look at one template in many different ways!