A riff on Imagine with a little bit of Magic

I'm really excited about Jeanette Lynton's Magic scrapbooking how-to book which teaches you how to create interactive elements in your layouts. There are a lot of neat techniques/tricks demonstrated, and I've been wanting to try them out, but all of my current projects are using CM scrapbooks, which although I love for the quality, are not drop in style pages. Most of the Magic patterns are geared toward drop-in style pages and require to cut the Memory Protector to allow the interactive element to function. Since the CM page protectors slide on sideways and aren't as sturdy as the CTMH memory protectors, I didn't want to chance cutting them, and this rules out most of the Magic techniques. Still, there are a few that will work with the side load protectors. Of course I decided to try Filmstrip (pg 58), one of the more complicated. On top of that, I don't have a lot of teeny tiny photos as the book example uses, so I decided to adapt the technique to use in a layout from Imagine called Conclusion Combo (pg 57). And, since I can't seem to be able to leave anything alone, I also altered the Imagine layout just a touch.

These are just preliminary pictures as the filmstrip element's middle and top layer are not fully adhered yet. I have Memory Protectors and 3D foam tape on order, but didn't want to wait for them to arrive to start. I'm also planning to add a little emphasis to the tab where you pull it out. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out, despite the fact that, due to all of the changes I made in terms of using a different picture size, it took a lot of reading, re-reading, re-re-reading. I will say that what I didn't realize is that there are actually three layers involved, top, sliding layer, and then the one below, so you really have to put some thought into where the pictures go. I would suggest creating the three layers separately and then using dotto dots to play with the elements you want to adhere. I ended up having to move things around several times so that everything made sense both on the closed version and the pulled out version. Also, because I didn't use a consistent size for the filmstrip (picture on the left is larger than the rest), I ended up having to have a wider stopper on the left, which I didn't figure out until I was moving the three elements around to figure out placement of pictures/journaling.

Although it was time consuming, and at times frustrating, I did have fun, and there's a real sense of accomplishment when you get it figured out and set up the way you want. I am definitely looking forward to trying out some other techniques from Magic!

CTMH Products Used:

Border stamp from 'Enjoy Life' with Outdoor Denim Ink, White and Moonstruck cardstock, playful lowercase