Here is a new challenge for you from the authors of, Creative Ideas for Events and Holidays. The book features the dynamic team of Sara Winnick and Margaret Scarborough. In their new eBook, they tackle 12 unique scrapbooking challenges, sharing dozens of ideas for freshening up birthday layouts, Christmas pages, and Halloween designs—not to mention layouts about the first day of school, Valentine's Day, Disneyland vacations, and more! Get ready to get inspired. We asked them to make some pages exclusively for our blog. Second up is a photo mat challenge.

Mat your photos on a neutral colored tag, frame, or cardstock

From Margaret

This layout documents a somewhat bittersweet day for both Matthew and I. Although he was super excited to go back to school to see all his friends, he also knew that this was going to be his last quarter there as we would soon be moving to Florida. Thankfully, he’s made several good friends here in Florida too. And he still manages to keep in touch with all his California friends via the phone and computer.

If you have pictures that have colors that are hard to coordinate with, try using a neutral color scheme and add just minimal amounts of color. The shipping tags serve as perfectly sized photo mats and keep with the neutral color scheme.

From Sara

I love the look of kraft and distressed white paper for a simple clean look, but found that my page needed a little pop of color.  To add color without adding patterned paper I stamped the bottom edge of my kraft paper with colorful eggs.  Because this was all done digitally I was able to pull the colors for the eggs directly from my photos using the eyedropper tool. I used the mailing labels with decorative edges as photo mats to add minimal contrast.

Supplies: patterned papers (Sketchbook Artistry by Sue Cummings (for Oscraps), Kraft by Crystal Wilkerson) + stitching and eggs (Katie Pertiet) + photo mats (Paislee and Feifei) + Teletype and Calibri fonts