In 1999, Tami began her scrapbook store in Williamsburg, Virginia. For two years she ran her shop and supplied scrapbook items for her community.
While running her shop, there were scrapbook items Tami wanted, but were not available anywhere in the industry. So she began designing her own products - Alphaduets was one of her first original scrapbook products.
Layouts Using Tami's Alphaduets:
Shortly after she started her store, Tami Potter bought a brand new camera. She planned to take photos of her two daughters at the pumpkin patch. Her husband didn't like the new camera - so he brought the older one along. In the end, hundreds of photos were taken at the pumpkin patch - more than could fit on a traditional scrapbook layout.
Tami couldn't decide on which photos she wanted to use - there were so many! She wanted to figure out how to capture all the movement on a 12x12 page - how could she do it?
Her thoughts went back to art school. She remembered a photographer who had taken a bunch of pictures over a period of time in a defined space. He displayed his photos in overlapping layouts that mimicked viewing an entire space (similar to a collage style).
This photographer inspired Tami to blend her photos on a 12x12 layout. She grabbed a plain 12x12 sheet, a ruler, and a pencil and started to draw in lines to place 1x1 inch squares, with 1/8 inch gaps between, all over the layout. Then, she cut her pumpkin patch photos into 1x1 inch squares and started placing them on the grid.
All the photos blended together and made an amazing collage that used multiple photos and showed the action around the pumpkin patch. The layout below was the start of Tami’s Mosaic Moments journey:
Creating the mosaic layout was a fun and exciting project for Tami. Customers from her store also wanted to learn this process; however, drawing in all those lines was very time consuming. So, Tami needed a better and faster solution. That was when the Mosaic Moments® scrapbook system was born!
From her training in graphic design, Tami applied the same design principles to create a GRID for her scrapbook pages.
The Grid Paper keeps all of your photos and paper mats neat, straight, and organized. The grid is designed to give you a professional layout design. This is the foundation for every single layout created by the Mosaic Moments design team.
Along with the grid paper, Tami created a whole scrapbook system. Originally it was the Mosaic Moments® cutting mat - which was designed to work with the grid paper. In 2014, she created dies that were measured to fit the grid - so it became easier than ever to cut each piece.
Take a look at just a few of the pages Tami and her design team have created over the years on Mosaic Moments® grid paper:
