A good friend of mine has a great great grandmother who was a formidable woman. Born in 1851, she clearly liked to do things in threes. She had three children before she got married, three children afterward and three husbands in total. She skipped school because she preferred dancing and learned to read and write alongside her youngest child when she was in her forties. Altogether a remarkable story, but I didn't need to know that, because I have seen her picture and when you look at her, you can tell.
My friend is very lucky in having a large number of family pictures from the 1870-1890 period, and I have really enjoyed helping her build beautiful scrapbook pages to enhance the pictures and record what she knows about her family before it is all forgotten. When you have wonderful pictures like these scrapbooking is the best hobby in the world because you can use your talents to tell a story. The first thing to do is digitize the picture. You need to be sure you have a copy in case something goes wrong. One of the pictures we worked on had a nasty tear we were able to fix using photoshop, other pictures were just old looking, and those we left, because it seemed the right thing to do.
Because, as I said, the lady did things in three's, we divided the page into three horizontal bands and colored them using Tim Holtz distress inks. Tea Dye was a good match for some of the slight marks on the photograph itself so we created a smudged background and then on the top band we stamped over it using some of my favorite stamps, an art stamp of a collage including a letter and heart. We stamped once in dark brown and then again, at right angles, in gold.
Within the family, Great Great Grandma Georgina was famous for her dress sense of humor and for the fact that she married in black, a garment which apparently was made of black and covered with iridescent beads. (And incidentally, made by one of my friends other great great grandmothers). Although we had no pieces of the dress, we wanted to remember the story, so we used a remnant of beaded black lace as a matte for her picture and made a tiny embellishment, a pair of ballet shoes (to represent her dancing). For journaling we made a large tag scrunched it up and then smoothed it out and applied Tea Dye Distress ink and stamped and embossed it with a gold book and pen before beginning to write her story.
On the facing page my friend created a short diagram like a family tree, then sent away for her great great grandmother's birth certificate, scanned and reduced it in size to add it to the page. Because the page seemed just a little bare, we cut a pattern from a paper doll and cut out the dress using black glitter paper and added a small recipe for a face mask made with oatmeal (something Georgina had used to preserve her skin which remained very beautiful to the day she died, in 1931!). To soften the whole thing we added a silk ribbon in a soft antique rose and hung from it a tiny pearl, a replica of the earrings Great Great Grand mama had left behind.
You can make a page just like this using Tim Holtz Distress Inks and other scrapbooking supplies at Dinglefoot's Scrapbooking.
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