An Experiment in Purple

Recently, I wrote about catching up with my "Colour! or is it Color?" class. I had lost my momentum when I was originally part of the class and had only managed two of the layouts which was such a shame. 

I shared green and blue with you in that last post. (I blogged about red and yellow last year).

Well, next on the rainbow comes indigo and violet, ie. purple. Do you like purple? Do you scrap with purple? I can't say that I had ever thought about it before but if I had thought about it, I would have said, neh, not my thing. I'm a pink girl. 

But purple was the colour we should use and we should see if we could be converted to loving purple. I was sceptical. But decided to jump in anyway.

I had used BG Euphoria during LOAD last month and it's soooo hard to use - or it is for me at least. Knowing it had a lot of purple in it, I challenged myself to use it. I tried not to think too much about it and really go for the stronger tones of purple in the collection. 

I grabbed these three adorable photos and just decided not to worry about the colours in them but just make it work. And I had a set of the chipboard pieces and threw on a whole load of them instead of lots of layered clustering. I took Nic H's advice to throw in some other colours (I chose blue and green and just a bit of pink) and a splash of something quite bright (that red paper). Nothing would have possessed me to use these colours together before and I am still really unsure about what to think of it, but you know what? I don't dislike it as much as I thought I would. Now that is something I wasn't expecting.

I followed the sketch quite closely because I love the three photo design. Mine looks nothing like Nic's, but I think it is quite me!

Once I had done one purple layout in really bright shades, I wondered if I would like it if I made one with softer shades - BG Wisteria.

Again, I followed the sketch quite closely, just mirrored it to the left. I made the flowers and leaves that Nic had suggested but less product in the cluster itself. And I always need a little bit of journalling so a sticker journalling block was perfect. I just grabbed some pretty flower photos as the layout was more of an experiment than anything too serious. 

I like this one more than the last - the shades are more what I use usually, but I am really surprised at how purple I can go.

Like it or not, it's great to take the challenge to select product that wouldn't normally be used. These purple buttons were unlikely to be anywhere on any layout without this challenge, nor the lilac gems. And I think they work really well.

One last thing? When I had finished the first purple layout using Euphoria, I decided to make a couple of cards using some scraps. I've heard from lots of card makers that they make one or two cards from whatever is left on the table and decided that it was a great idea. And it was. Within a couple of minutes, I had two simple cards. I am trying to make more and more cards at the moment. First, practice makes perfect (I'm not a good card maker yet!) and second, I really hate to hand over so much money for nice cards when I have all the necessary right here in my room. I really must try this technique more often as I was very pleased with myself.

The moral of the story? I can be very prejudiced about colours and maybe I just need to select odd papers and make them work, regardless of the colours. I have way too many papers to be fussy!

What is the colour that you avoid the most? Care to share and then make a layout using exactly that?

Give it a try!