Hello! Happy Monday and welcome to
the blog today!
It’s Meg and I’m
over the moon to be sharing my first ever Papermaze project with you, using the
beautiful Pinkfresh Studio
‘Keeping it Real’ collection.
I really love these
papers – the colours are incredibly fresh and versatile, the quality and thickness
of the paper is noticeable and the collection itself lends itself to all kinds
of themes and events easily.
I was so inspired by the patterned paper Daily
Grind – I couldn’t decide whether to use it as a background paper, to use a
smaller area of it or to fussy cut it (the options are so limitless with this paper,
I ended up buying a second sheet!), but I really loved the sweet little ice creams
and so I eventually decided to pair it with an ice cream cutfile I had seen by
Peartree Cutfiles. The cutfile actually included two ice creams but I only
wanted one, so I enlarged it, cut it out with my Cricut and placed it on my
Daily Grind background paper to wait for more inspiration to strike.
Placing the cutfile on the paper helped me
to decide that the patterned paper would be too busy and stood out too much
behind the ice cream, so I backed the ice cream cone and wafer sticks in the more
subtle striped patterned paper Tiny
Victories and decided I would keep the ‘ice cream’ part white, but with
some mixed media ‘sauce’ and sprinkles. The sprinkles came from my stash, but Doodlebug
Design do similar sprinkles.
I dabbed some pink acrylic on to the ice
cream with some kitchen roll and backed the cherry in red, from a small part of
the Big
Mood striped paper. Following this, I noticed the cute ‘Enjoy’ flag with ‘the
little things’ written underneath on the Reality
Check paper, which I thought would just be perfect poking out of the top of
the ice cream. I fussy cut it out and carefully poked a couple of holes in it
so that I could use embroidery thread to attach it to a cocktail stick! I saved
the ‘the little things’ sentiment and used it as an embellishment later on, as
I love using up tiny pieces and not letting anything go to waste!
I absolutely love patterned or cut-apart paper
that can be fussy cut, turned into tags or embellishments as it really makes your
money stretch further and you can create such unique pieces.
Next, I placed the ice cream onto white
Bazzill
Avalanche cardstock (which is definitely my favourite white cardstock because
of the subtle linen texture it adds to the page) but with the ice cream also
being in white, it just seemed to fall a little flat on the page. I moved the
Daily Grind paper around with the Avalanche cardstock and ice cream to decide which
combination fitted the best, but every which way I moved the paper (with half
and half, more of patterned paper and less of the white, more of the white and
less of the patterned), it just seemed to be ‘too much’ or ‘not enough’! I considered
changing the ice cream colour on the cutfile to pink or even yellow, but I
liked the way the sprinkles and sauce stood out on the white. Eventually I
tried adding the pink
Bazzill
Romance cardstock between the white Avalanche and the Daily Grind paper and
I found that it really worked well as a bridge of colour between the two and really
brought out the colours in the Daily Grind. It was at this point I decided to
go with the large banner shape that I cut the Avalanche cardstock out of and to
use the Daily Grind paper to be a secondary banner behind the white and to
repeat the vertical lines either side of the page.
Once I had decided the shape placement on
the page, I started to get down to the nitty-gritty embellishing! I dripped
some more pink mixed media ‘sauce’ down the page behind where the ice cream
would be, topped it with some darker pink paint drips and some gold to the ice
cream cone before adhering the ice cream, matted my photo twice in the Romance
and Avalanche and began picking out florals from the Floral
Cardstock Die Cut pack that worked best with the layouts colour scheme – I chose
mostly pink, yellow and blue flowers and arranged them around the photo in
colour triangles to bring attention to the photo in the centre.
After I had stuck down the floral dies, I
stuck down the ‘the little things’ that I had saved when I made the flag
earlier, a few
puffy
stickers and thought about my title for the page. I went with ‘You are the
Sprinkles to my Ice Cream’ to go with the ice cream cutfile and I decided to
stamp it on using stamps from my stash as I was running a little short of alpha
thickers (don’t worry, I’ve been on a shopping spree and fixed that now)!
I decided to add another small cluster of
floral die cuts and the blue teapot puffy sticker on the other side of the page
to balance out the large cutfile and I finished with some journalling to tell
the story of the photo.
Thank you for looking at my page today
and I hope you feel inspired to give the beautiful Keeping it Real collection a
try – the colours are stunning and will make you smile!
Have a lovely week and I hope you pop by
again soon – I will be back again too at some point this month to show you how
I use more of the collection.
Take care,
Meg x