I cannot tell you just how excited I am today. Today I get to announce this fabulous gal as the newest design team member for our lovely little neck of the woods.

I’ve known Layle for a few years now. Many of you may remember her from her Scenic Route days…and I know she’s been around in more places than that. I’ve always admired her style. She’s just awesome! She always does such fabulous work and I can’t tell you how thrilled I am that she is now a part of the KBS team!

So let’s see what Layle has to say and show us today! 

Hi friends!  Layle Koncar here.  I am so over the moon excited about joining the list of extremely talented designers on Kerri’s team!  I’m a relative ’newbie’ when it comes to all things die cut.  I’ve been scrapbooking for more than 15 years, and believe it or not, the Silhouette Cameo was the first die cut machine I purchased.  I picked it up last September after hearing and seeing so many great things it could do, and trust me when I say I’m now a convert.  I believe!!  I’m continually amazed at all of the great things that little machine can do!

I have a pretty clean, simple and graphic style.  I’m really drawn to white backgrounds and bright colors.  The one thing that’s pretty consistent across every scrapbook page that I do, besides photos of course, are titles.  I put a title on everything.  Everything.  That’s one of the MANY reasons I’m so excited to be joining the team and playing with Kerri’s amazing artwork – she has the best titles!

When I saw this title, I knew it was the perfect title to accompany the photo I snapped on my iPhone of my youngest son at his 6th grade parent teacher conferences last fall.

[ Shapes | Say What #3 (title) ]

I cut directly on the white cardstock base for my layout and then used the teal diagonal patterned paper to back the layout.  One of the things I love about this title is that the words ‘you’ and ‘wonderful’ include an outline cut, so they really stand out.

I teach scrapbook classes, so one of things I’m always focusing on when I’m working on my layouts are tips that I figure out that might help someone else.  Here’s a quick and easy tip to help you when you’re working with words and titles like I used on this layout.

When you’re working with cut words, you have the ‘positive’ part of the letter and the ‘negative’ part of the letter.  With this layout, I think of the positive parts of the letters as what I had when I pulled my 12×12 white cardstock base from the Silhouette mat.  You can see those represented by the teal patterned paper.  The negative parts of the letters are the pieces that were still attached to the mat after I removed the 12×12 base – basically the white ‘insides’ of the letters.  This tip is a super easy way of placing in the exact right spot the ‘negative’ or insides of the letters.

Here I’ve left the ‘negative’ or inside pieces off of the letters ‘g’ and ‘s’ in the word ‘things’.

I laid the segment with the letters ‘n’ and ‘g’ and ‘s’ that were left on my mat back in their places in the word ‘things’.

With that, it was very easy to see exactly where the center of the ‘g’ and the piece that connected the ‘g’ and ‘s’ needed to go!  I added a quick dab of liquid adhesive to where those pieces needed to go and stuck them down.

When I lifted the segment with the letters ‘n’ and ‘g’ and ‘s’ off of the layout – VOILA – the pieces were exactly where they needed to be!

If you’re like me, getting those little center and connector pieces in the right place is a must have :)

I hope this little tip helps you the next time you’re working with words and titles on your projects!

Great tip there Miss Layle! We are just so thrilled to have you here!