Hi everyone. It's Marcy here. Today I'd like to show you how I made my chevron background on a recent layout of mine.
I've wanted to do a layout with a large chevron pattern on it for a long time and I thought it might make a great tutorial.
So, here we go.
1. Start with first selecting the patterned papers that you'd like to use.
I knew, because I wanted my background to be a chevron, I would loose the "white space" that I love. With this in mind I chose similar colored papers.... so that they felt almost monochromatic and flat. If my zig zags were a variety of colors the pattern would've popped even more!
Trim a bunch of pieces into 1"x3" strips. (Here's three. I ended up added a cream cardstock to the mix after I took this photo.)
2. Take two of the same pieces and overlap them so they form an "L".
3. Now trim from the "mountain" to the "valley"...
... so that you snip off two little triangles.
4. Arrange your pieces into the first "zig" of your "zag" and grab another piece. Place this piece off the end of one of the pieces and overlap just like you did earlier.
5. Trim from the "mountain" to the "valley" of these pieces as well. Keep repeating till your pattern is the width you want.
Take a few pieces of another pattern and do all this over again. Keep going with all your patterned pieces.
6. I chose to adhere my pattern to a smaller piece of cardstock... mostly so I could reposition it on my page until it was where I wanted it and because I wanted to sew the strips and felt that it would be easier to maneuver. So, adhere your pieces down.
At this point I sewed the chevron down, curled up the edges and assembled my layout. Here's a closeup of some of the stitching.
And that's it. If you're going to give this tutorial a try I'd love to see how it turns out! Link up in the comment section and post your layout in our gallery so we can check it out!