May 24, 2011
Grandpa’s Go Train – Crate Paper and Echo Park Paper
Most people who know me and know my family, also know how train obsessed my son is. He eats, breathes, thinks and LIVES for trains… “train, train, train”… all day long. Recently, he’s come to understand (as much as a 3-year-old can, anyway) that my Dad is a former Vice President of The Canadian Car Division of Hawker Siddeley, who manufactured trains and passenger coaches from the late 1960′s to the mid 1970′s. When my Dad was in charge of the division, they built the Go Transit commuter trains that you see all around the Toronto area, the TTC street cars and subway cars and a few more well-known trains.
Anyway, ‘back on track’ (tee hee…) — Eric is really, really impressed by this and he gets really excited any time he sees a Go Train, he yells, “Grandpa’s Go Train!”. I created this layout showing Eric waiting to ‘get on the Go’ from Oakville to Union. Strangely enough, we were waiting for the train to go see a Thomas and Friends Live show. Yes, he took a train, to go see another train, and then took yet another train home again… Like I said, TRAIN! TRAIN! TRAIN! All day long…
I wanted the journaling tags to have a typewriter style font. Since I don’t own a typewriter, and printing directly on the tiny tags with my printer posed a bit of a problem, I improvised. I scanned the Basic Grey tags with my scanner and then I opened the files in Photoshop. Next, I typed the text to fit on the tag (to scale) and then I printed the text on a coordinating paper. I cut out my printed text and glued it on to the tags. And, voilà! You can barely tell that the text wasn’t printed directly on the tags. It looks super authentic and very ‘custom’, but with minimal effort on my part. There are other ways to do this of course. I could have just hand written on the tags, or I could have done it by trial and error with a word processing program, like Microsoft Word.
Some of you might notice that there is a slight discrepancy in the imagery in my layout, but I’m allowing for creative license for that! As any train expert would know, my embellishments — the train Silhouette die cut, the Crate Paper border and train cutouts and the My Mind’s Eye train chipboard, are all actually steam engine trains and the Go Trains are diesels. Oh well… Please forgive my inaccuracy, there weren’t many train embellishments to choo-choose from! 
P.S. I like to give credit where credit is due, most of the items used in my layout come from Noel Mignon‘s Jump n’ Jive kit. I love her kits! Beautiful and chock FULL of awesomeness!
