Paper Bakery Guest Detective - Grace Tolman

[Debbi Tehrani]

I'm a mom to an 8 year old boy and a 6 year old girl. Therefore my life is usually filled with learning, new discovery, bribery and driving to and from all of our activities. I have a loving and very supportive husband of almost 10 years. When the kids have gone to bed at night, my time is spent crafting while catching up on my favorite shows and movies. I also enjoy reading, window shopping, knitting and perusing blogs for inspirations. 

Over a year go, we moved to Colorado from California and we are enjoying our new environment. I feel very inspired with my new home, my new scrapbook space and the mountain views. I also recently started my own photography business focusing on family and children portraits. My love for scrapbooking has spilled to a new found passion for photography in which I feel will just make my skill in papercrafting even better. 

Although I’ve been doing some type of scrapbooking since grade school, I only started to scrapbook seriously after my son was born. When he was born I knew I will be staying at home with him but coming from a fast paced sales job I was afraid I would ran out of things to do during the day. Little did I know that with a newborn you won’t have anytime to do anything else. Anyways after going through a basic scrapbooking class I was hooked and haven’t stopped scrapping since. My style has evolved through the years but there's one thing that never changes- my quest to tell the story. That's always the first thing I think of when I want to make a scrapbook page and/or project. And lately I've been inspired by pattern papers and fun, bright colors.

Interrogation:

What is your favorite color(s) to work with? This varies from time to time, especially on what mood or theme I'm working on but I find myself gravitating to white for my neautral pick and then sprinkles of bright colors for pop.

What would you say is your "fingerprint" on your scrapbook pages? (i.e., what do most of your pages have that make it your signature style?) this is a good question and I'm not sure if my answer is perfect enough, but I have to say it's two things....one grounding my page. I almost always matt my page with a cardstock or another pattern paper and two, my visual triangle elements, I always have that in all of my pages.

What do you find most challenging when working on a layout? the most challenging thing for me is to make sure I capture the "story" at it's best. It's hard sometimes to do it because the page is dictated by a challenge (working with specific color scheme or elements) or by the manufacturer's product that I'm working on. I try to maintain the balance and my end goal is to always document the story.

What is your favorite part about CSI--the colors, the stories, or the inspiration? I love 'em all. I've not done challenges in a while and having some distinct parameters to work with really challenges me to get out of my comfort zone. Thank you CSI.

Confession time. Okay, fess up! What secret do you not want to admit but are willing to confess here? Wow this is hard as I feel like I'm an open book but in the last month, I've been trying to cut down on the processed foods that I feed my family therefore I had stopped purchasing chips for us BUT bbq potato chips is my sin of choice (LOL) that I had bought some and hid it from my kids. I figured that I have the right to sometimes choose the wrong foods but the kids can't. Sssshhh. let's keep this our little secret ok. *wink*

To see more of my work, please visit my blog, In Her Shoes, or my photography blog, Grace Tolman Photography.