Celebrate

Happy Saturday everyone! I don't know about you but I have been so looking forward to the weekend! Two of my kiddos started school a week and a half ago and I have been slow to adjust to my new schedule. This past summer I gave myself permission to take the break easy-no real schedule, hanging out at home, being mellow.....and I have certainly been paying for it! And to be perfectly honest, the only reason I am able to sit down and write this post is the fact that my daughter is home sick. Having already taken my (grumpy) 9th grader to school, I am pretty much on chill status this morning and finally have some time to share a new layout! Yay!

Despite having a Silhouette Portrait, I still regularly use my manual diecut machine--sometimes when I want a simple shape it's is just so much easier and less time consuming to pull it out and cut my shapes. This is especially true anytime I want some circles, like I did for this next layout:

I went into this layout knowing that I wanted to do some sort of a grid using a mix of patterned papers and that I wanted them to be circles. I ended up going with a two by two grid. Then, to take my grid idea even further, I machine stitched a grid connecting the four circles.

To balance my layout I "floated" one of the remaining circles in the top left corner of my layout. Anytime I am working with this type of layout design-one where the bulk of the layout is either at the top or the bottom-I will usually "cut" my layout diagonally into two triangles and will make sure to fill one of them.

 

I used a mix of products for this layout that includes bright and colorful papers and embellishments from Chickaniddy, Seven Paper, Dear Lizzy, Crate Paper, and October Afternoon. 

Wishing you a great day!

Michelle

Citrus Twist Kits: This

Hello! Today I want to share the first project I made with the Citrus Twist June Kits!

When I set out to make a new layout, I always start with my photo and patterned paper. As I pick and choose my papers, my photo is always in my field of vision, guiding me on my color choices. For this photo, I really wanted to pick up on the yellow in my daughter's jacket as well as the pink and turquoise beads she is wearing. You can see here that I settled on four papers, the cut apart journaling card paper, and white cardstock which all came from both the June "Sweet Thing" Main kit and the Patterned Paper Play Add-ons. 

Whenever I am working with a bigger element, such as these large letters from the June "Whole Lot of Love" Embellishment kit, I like to work them into the design very early on. At this point I hadn't adhered anything down, but I wanted to start playing around with the position of my title. Usually my title placement comes way later, but since it was going to require so much space, I needed to get the title into the design early on. To do this, I cut the individual letters out while they were still on the plastic that way I could easily move them around.

After completing the layout, I immediately moved on to the accompanying pocket style page. I cut apart the journaling card sheet from the Main Kit, grabbed my photos, all edited with the Collect App, and a few small embellishments.  

Here are the finished projects:

As I mentioned before, I used a variety of products from several of June's Kits, but I also added a white tag from own stash and a copper banner clip that I had leftover from May's kits.

If you hadn't already noticed, I do like to keep my pocket pages simple and pretty flat, but this doesn't mean that I don't embellish my cards. Here I made them my own by adding mist droplets and stitching.

Wishing you a great week!

Michelle

Hip Kit Club: Today

As I was brainstorming ideas for this layout, I realized I hadn't used the awesome circle paper from the Hip Kit Club May Main Kit. Often times I find myself reaching for a certain paper over and over again. When I find something that I love, I want to keep going with it. And, because I don't often use big chunks of paper, I can really stretch and prolong the life of a single sheet of paper. However, I wasn't going to do the kit justice by going with what I had used before, so I pulled out the circle paper and went with it, despite the fact that the lovely stripe/large chevron Dear Lizzy paper was calling my name ;).

   

When the new scrapbooking lines debuted at CHA in January, Pink Paislee's Citrus Bliss was in my top three. I loved the bright fresh colors and the fun icons-lemons, pineappples, flamingoes...and now, thanks to the inclusion of the line in May's Kits, I am even more impressed with the collection.  The colors are really quite beautiful.

   

   

 Happy Wednesday!

Michelle