Trash the Dress (TTD)

On thing that I was so excited to do (and most people thought I was crazy for) was to trash my wedding dress.  It has become a new trend in for brides to trash their dresses after the wedding.  You go out with a photographer to a location and take interesting and fun photos of you in your dress.  They can be at the beach, in the woods, at a junk yard, in an urban setting.  Pretty much anywhere. 

This is where most people ask "Why in the world would you want to trash a dress you spent so much money on?"  Well I will help allay some fears by saying that most people get their dress wet or a little dirty, but there is no permanent damage.  It usually cleans up nicely.  My dress got wet, muddy, and grass stained, but once I sprayed it down with a hose almost all of it came off.  It still needs to be professionally cleaned but it looks pretty good still.  So why did I do trash the dress photos?  I think they are amazing photos.  They are so fun and edgy and different.  I am a sucker for cool photography.  Plus I am never going to wear the dress again so why not!

After months of sitting on my photos I have slowly started working on the layouts.  So far I have three done (one I already posted on here, but I will post it again) and I have about 14 more to go.  I am doing a 8x8 album of just my TTD photos.  I decided to keep a semi-cohesive look through the entire album (something I rarely do) and I am using the paper line Sultry by Basic Grey.  It is feminine and pretty and also slightly edgy and fun too.  Plus the name is PERFECT for TTD photos.

This is the first layout I did for the album.  I handmade the flowers using a folding technique.  I started with white circles inked one side orange and the other pink, then I embossed them in my cuttlebug and inked the raised areas with bronze metallic ink.  Then came all the folding!  These bugger take forever, but they are well worth it.  The squares along the top are just 1 inch cut from different patterned papers and the distressed and inked.  The final touch was stamping layered flourishes around the border of the photo.  I am standing in the middle of a stream in Colorado in MAY which means it is COLD!!!  Nothing like freezing your butt off for some great photos.

This was my second layout.  I already posted it because I did it as design team work for Frosted Designs.  It was our first challenge to have ink or chalk on every piece of paper on the layout.  The design of this is fairly simple.  I used multiple staggered mats and then added some cut out flowers from pattered paper on pop dots.  Finally I finished it all off with a Prima Say it in Crystals Bling flourish that I cut into three pieces and stamped the corners using a Tim Holtz stamp.  This is one of my favorite photos.  It is actually a candid shot.  I wasn't posing.  I was just trying to figure out how the heck to get my dress over the branch without ripping it.

My final layout that I have complete so far was for a Scrap your Avatar Challenge on scrapbook.com.  This photo happened to be my avatar so it gave me a good excuse to scrap it.  It is hard to see, but I started out with the background by using a glimmer screen and tattered leather and graphite glimmer mist.   It gave a nice graininess to the background.  Then I just started layering papers and playing around.  It is pretty typical of my scrapping style.  It has staggered mats, bling and things hand cut from printed paper.  After writing this I am starting to feel that maybe my style needs a little bit of a shakeup to get me out of my rut.  What do you think?