Customer Reviews

Designing with Details

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If I'd taken more time to look through this book before I bought it, I wouldn't have bought it. If your scrapbooking style is funky-eclectic-freestyle, you'll probably like it a lot, and find a lot of good ideas in it. There's a heavy preoccupation with 'found objects', including sewing notions -- lots of sewing notions - plus elements such as cupcake papers and rubber bands, which are of unknown acidity, and there's no discussion of the need for dealing with that issue, much less how to do it. Some of the 'found objects' are things I've never heard of or seen before, and they just look odd in a layout. There's a real air of "Mom has an art degree and is determined to use it" in this book. Many of the pages are chaotic, and several are just a real mess. A couple of pages have a look of just being a desperate attempt to use objects the artist was told to use by the editor, and she finally slapped something together and called it done.

To me, a book entitled "Designing with Details" would have a wider range of styles and materials than this one did. If you want to learn about designing with details, then go to some of the Internet websites that have some really well-done pages, print a few of them out, and study them. You'll have a wealth of information for a very low cost. But if you haven't yet done enough stitching; if you have some junk hanging around that you're dying to glue to a scrapbook page (!), this book may be for you. But really, there's not much new or innovative here.

I love the precision of Jennifer McGuire's work, the whimsy of Kelli Crowe's work, and the wonderful gift ideas by Kathy Blackstone -- you rock Kathy! This book was given to me as a gift from my artist aunt and really got me thinking in a whole new direction.