Love My Tapes: December Guest Designer - Svetlana Austin, Part One

Hello and Happy Friday Love My Tapes friends!

Today, we are highlighting a special designer, Svetlana Austin, our December Guest Designer. Let's get to know her a little better.

Hi, everyone! My name is Svetlana Austin. I am a Russian girl who ended up living in hot South Africa for the last 11 years. I met my husband while he was doing mission work in Russia. We have 2 beautiful sons who keep us busy and fill our lives with sunshine (not that we have lack of it in the northern part of our country). I was always creative. I tried many different crafts but once I was introduced to scrapbooking by my friend, I never stopped. It was 8 years ago. I defiantly love to create layouts about my little boys the most. My aim is to reflect their personalities through my work. I love to make real boy’s layouts full of colors and details. I like to use paint and sprays in my projects, as well as hand-stitching. Sometimes I like to make very romantic and feminine layouts about myself or about my girl-friends. It allows me to express the stuff that I personally like. My scrapbooking style is always determined by photographs I use and what kind of story I would like to tell through my project. I had a pleasure to design for various Russian and international challenge blogs. Also I was honored to be part of Kaisercraft's DT 2011-2012. You can visit my blog at Colourful Memories (http://www.colorfulmemories-protea.blogspot.com/)
I am very thankful to Tina for inviting me to be a Guest Designer at Love My Tapes this month!

Svetlana's first project is an absolutely gorgeous card. Here's what she had to say about it.

I made this card as a gift for one very special person - for no specific occasion. I decorated it with antique self adhesive lace. I also used floral fabric tape to make little decorative banners. For that I applied two rows of the tape on a piece of cardstock overlapping it a little. After that I just cut the banners in the size it needed them to be. This allowed me to achieve more dimension on my card.

Svetlana's second project is a stunning layout.

Layout:
Though most of my projects are about my boys I actually like real girly stuff - flowers and some frills. I am so much in love with the lace tape I received that it became the main inspiration behind all of my projects I created for LMT.
This lace has nice shabby feel to it and it is a pure pleasure to be able to stick it on right away.For this layout I made some alteration to the lace by cutting it out to create softer round look on the lacy border.
I also used washi tape to make a little corner matting for my photo. I sticked it on a piece of cardstock and then cut it out. It gave nice contrasting accent to my layout.