Pinkfresh Studios, Keeping it Real - 'You are the Sprinkles to my Ice Cream' by Meg

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