Good morning,
Back in November, Janet from RTS Scrapbooking released her 4for4 Series – Heritage Round. It is a great series with many tips and tricks for creating heritage layouts. Now, I’m not a fan of making heritage layouts and I think generally this is because most people use very dull coloured papers with old fashioned flowery/object prints. I’m more a bright colour girl and so, I thought I would challenge myself and have a go. Around the same time, in the Love RTS FB group, there was a post suggesting you sort and collect up papers which challenged you, the ugly, the old, dated and ‘the untouchables’ and make them into kits. Now, I have a stack of papers that don’t appeal to my tastes, so these were the papers I decided to use for my heritage layouts. Some Love RTS members loved the papers which I detested, we all have different tastes and for me, purple is yucky, as are flower prints which remind me of my Nanna’s wallpaper!
Here are my ‘untouchables’, papers I don’t like…
I started off with the pink and green patterned and floral papers, using a photo of my grandfather. Now, flowers and men usually don’t mix but the story behind the photo is quite romantic and I thought I would get away using these girly papers. This is the photo that my grandfather had taken to send to his sweetheart, my Nanna, during the war. On the bottom right corner, you can see the sweet message he scribed to her.
Janet’s layout features a diagonal patterned paper format and I followed the same process. You can watch Janet’s video here. As my grandfather was in his motorcycle uniform I found some images related to his job in the war and printed them out to use as embellishments. A tip when using home-printed embellishments, they can sometimes look a little flat in colour, but you can achieve a more polished finish 
by rubbing each image with a little Tim Holtz Distress Micro Glaze. It just makes the colour pop a little more and looks like a bought die cut. I also printed a heritage document from the website recommended on RTS, https://olddesignshop.com/.
The finished layout turned out quite dashing with just a touch of floral.
My next layout is of my Nanna, the photo she had taken to send to my grandfather. I used one of the purple ‘untouchable’ papers for the background. For this layout, I wanted to use some embossing folders which I had recently purchased secondhand on FB Marketplace, they had come with a whole heap of steel dies I got cheap. I have hardly used embossing folders in my craft life, they fall into my old fashioned, untouchable category. So, this was the perfect time to try them out. I made embossed papers to use for mounts and layering behind the photo.
It is a simple process of inking one side of the plate before adding your paper/cardstock and running it through my Sizzix Bigshot.
The results are quite stunning and really did remind me of the old embossed wallpaper and brocade furniture in my Nanna’s house.
The next photo, I believe to be of them both on their wedding day. It was wartime, so times were tough and for them, there was no white wedding. For this layout, I used the rest of the green and pink untouchable papers. Amongst these papers was a rose floral which was just calling to be fussy cut, fussy cut I did! I also used more printable embellishments from the Old Design website, and it gave me an opportunity to use up some ribbon bows.
It was a fun experience creating heritage layouts and I didn’t mind the end results, however, I did lose interest and moved on to other challenges. One day, I will have another go and finish scrapping the small pile of heritage family photos that I have.
What I did have a go at was getting rid of some more of the purple ‘untouchable’ papers and scrapping some old family photos from the ’90s. I’m not sure I pulled it off, the papers were pretty ugly and gaudy, but I gave it my best shot. Anyway, more layouts in albums…the ultimate goal.
Keep on scrapping! 🙂
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