Sketches to Backgrounds

Have you ever come across a sketch that you instantly loved and wanted to use in your crafting but didn’t know how? Well friends, today is the day that you learn just how to turn those sketches into beautiful backgrounds for your layouts and projects! Mendi Yoshikawa is here to show us with a step-by-step tutorial.

Today’s layout is all about taking inspiration from sketches to create your own custom backgrounds using Pebbles newest Home+made collection!

I started with this sketch which I found on Pinterest.  To mimic the diamond background in the design I turned to my Silhouette software and the diamond nested and 12×12 background shapes.

Step 1: Size one diamond to 5.85 inches high and delete the rest.  Duplicate the shape by going to the “replicate” window and choosing the “column of three” option.  Put a window around all three diamonds and then chose the “row of three” option.  Group all 9 diamonds together.

Step 2: Size the bracket background shape to approximately 11″ x 11″.  Duplicate and set one aside (this will become your white cardstock background).  Take original and layer over 9 diamonds, using the align menu to “align center” and “align middle”.

Step 3:  Put a window around all and go the the “Modify” menu.  Select the “crop” option and it will crop the diamonds to the exact size of the shape (this is a particularly nice way to save on paper and make assembly easier).

Step 4:  Now that all of your shapes are cropped, I found it helpful to use the “fill color” option to assign a color to each patterned paper.  This allowed me to move them around and cut them from three different sheets of 6×6 patterned paper all at the same time! Love that!

Step 5:  After cutting out my background shape from white cardstock and and another one from black cardstock using the offset feature, I adhered them along with the diamonds and my photos to my layout.  To help my diamonds stay lined up, I drew a faint vertical and horizontal pencil line from point to point on my background bracket shape.  This helped me line up my center diamond and the others fell into place.  I also found it helpful to add my photos before creating my stitch marks to not only reduce the amount of stitching I would have to do, but to help my photos lay flat in my album.

Step 6: Using a ruler and a paper piercer, mark your stitch holes for hand sewing every 1/8 inch. With my diamonds set at 5.85″ tall, I found that each side measured 3.5″ long so I just put small marks with a pencil at 1.75″ to mark the center and keep my lines straight.

Step 7:  With a dull embroidery needle and some embroidery floss (I used 3 strands) stitch a running stitch through all your holes. This took me about an hour while watching TV, but I love the detail it adds!

Lastly you can embellish as desired.  I chose to follow the sketch pretty closely and layered all the fun new Thickers, tapes and dies from the Home+Made collection.

The sticker surface of the label is a little slick so to avoid smearing ink, I cheated and printed my words on white cardstock which I cut down to perfectly fit inside the label.

I think the touches of black and gold in this line are so elegant and will be beautiful for so many occasions!

Supplies: