Unzip the man

Inspiration is all around us and I take it from a lot of places — scrapbooking magazines, galleries, blogs, idea books, as well as advertising, fashion and home decor. Sometimes, I am inspired by the paper itself.

But this time, it was the new mini gear die from Tim Holtz/Sizzix that provided the inspiration and pulled all of the pieces together.

I am an as-I-go sort of cropper. I rarely have a finished picture in my head when I begin working. Normally, I gather things I think go together and then play around, adhering things as I go and figuring out the rest of it at the end. Somehow, it usually works.

I had this paper by Creative Imaginations (Be A Man) for a while, but hadn’t quite got around to using it — until the new die came into the store.

Suddenly, I saw the entire finished page in my head. I knew exactly how it would look, what tools I would need and how I would put it together. In fact, the hardest part was finding a photo of my husband that would fit the page. Eventually, I gave up that task and used a favorite of the two of us together.

Here’s how I did it …

The ribbon is from Maya Road. It comes with the zipper together. Since there is no zipper pull and I wasn’t sure I could back together if it came apart, I adhered the part I wanted to stay closed to the fence-link paper by Creative Imaginations, first. I used Glue Lines because they are strong and adhere instantly.

Then, I carefully took the zipper apart, adhering the rest onto the paper.

Once that was done, I used scissors to cut off the paper behind the zipper ribbon — so it would look like the paper was unzipping. Then I backed the whole thing with another sheet of Creative Imaginations paper, so everything was strong and secure. I matted the photo and attached it, cut out the title with my Cricut and then got to work embellishing the page.

The back of the gear paper has a lot of words on it and I really liked some of the phrases, so I cut those out (of an additional sheet) and adhered them. Then, I added a couple of stickers off of the coordinating sticker sheet.

Using some circle punches in various sizes, I punched out some of the gears from that extra sheet of paper and placed them around the page — some of them using dimensional foam. Then, using the gear die, I cut out a few gears from cardstock, dipped them onto an embossing pad and then covered them with embossing powder from JudiKins. I heated them to melt the powder and then placed them on the page as well.

Finally, I added some metal gears, brads and coins from Tim Holtz/Ideaology.

Here’s a closer look.