Celebrate - Carta Bella - Let's Celebrate Collection

Hello, it's Rebecca with you today and I'm sharing my first layout using Carta Bella's ‘Let’s Celebrate’ collection. This collection is full of bright colours and perfect for documenting birthday photos so I'm using the collection to scrap photos from my son's 4th birthday last month.

I was really drawn to the ‘Bunches of Balloons’ patterned paper - it's definitely my favourite from the collection. I wanted to use it in it's entirety but it was a little too 'busy' for me to use as a background paper so I needed to create some white space to work with. I decided to trim 1 inch from one edge of a sheet of Premium White Cardstock. This would allow me to have the balloon paper showing as a border around the edge of my page. I then tore two sections from the cardstock to place on the top and bottom of my background. This meant I ended up with a section of the patterned paper showing in the centre of my layout, and around the edge. 

I selected three photos for this layout, of my little one stood with his birthday balloons, and decided to display them in a small film strip style on the left of my page. I then used a hand drawn template to cut three balloons from the patterned papers. I've used the B side of ‘Party Palooza’ and both sides of the ‘One Year Older’ Paper. I made sure to centre my balloon over a number '4' on the 'One Year Older' paper so that I had a green number 4 on the balloon.

I doodled around the edge of the balloons with a black pen, and also drew on some strings to ground my balloons so they weren't just randomly floating. I've used foam pads behind the balloons to bring some dimension to the page. I've also doodled a border around the outside edge of the white cardstock to bring the layout all together and to match the black strings in the 'Bunches of Balloons' patterned paper. I've also used the red and green papers to add some layers behind my photos - of course with distressed edges!

I then worked on the opposite corner of my layout to balance out the page. I've used two of the larger stickers from the Element Stickers sheet - the 'celebrate' sticker will act as the title for this layout. 

I've used my star punch to create some embellishments for my layout - I've punched 5 stars in total (3 from the 'One Year Older' patterned paper and one from the ‘Hip Hip Hooray’ paper, to bring some navy blue into the layout). These also have a doodled black border on them for consistency. I also used a tiny star punch to add a sprinkling of smaller stars around the page. 

I further embellished my layout with some of the smaller stickers from the 'Element Stickers' sheet, and added some green ink splatters. 

This left the top right hand corner of my layout free to add my journalling. I wanted to say quite a bit, so I typed my journalling and printed it in small strips. I backed the strips onto the B side of the 'Party Paloozer' paper to help them stand out a bit better, and raised them up with foam.

I finished my layout with a few Matte Sprinkles by Doodlebug. I've never used these before but I love the texture of them so will definitely be featuring them on future layouts!

If you'd like to watch how the layout came together, I have a process video up on my YouTube channel which you can find here.

I'll be back a bit later in the month with my second layout with this collection, but in the meantime you can shop this collection and lots more goodies here.

Take care,

Rebecca x