Hi everyone, Rebecca here with you today sharing my first July layout. I really can't believe we are over half way through the year already - and halfway through summer... how did that happen?!
I'm working with a new collection this month - it's one of the 'Tulla & Norbert' collections from Photoplay, and it's called 'Sweet as Honey'. Now, I have a confession to make - I'm not a fan of gnomes or gonks (ssshhhhh don't tell Tulla or Norbert!) and as much as I loved the look of this collection, I was a little worried about how I might use it. But I was worrying over nothing - yes, there are a few gnomes, but there are also plenty of bees and florals, and many of the B sides of the papers were patterns without gnomes, so it was actually a pleasure to work with and I really love a lot of the papers.
I started by selecting a couple of my favourite papers - 'Buzzing By' - which is a gorgeous woodgrain paper with really cute bees and beehives on it, with a mustard yellow honeycomb pattern on the B side, and also 'Sweet Pollen' which is a black paper with beautiful yellow, white and green floral clusters on it. I used my metal nesting Hexagon dies to cut some hexagons in three different sizes from these papers, and also cut my photo into a hexagon shape. I also pulled out some floral metal dies to make myself some embellishments from the same papers.
Using my edge distressing tool, I added some texture to the hexagons and then arranged them horizontally across the centre of my page. I added some craft foam behind them all to introduce some dimension to the layout before sticking them down with double sided tape.
I scattered the die-cut flowers around the hexagons, layering some of them up to add some interest. Above my photo, I added a little tab that says 'Bee You' - this is from the Cardstock Ephemera pack. It's a great little pack with 26 pieces in it. I also added a ticket from the same pack which says 'Bee Awesome' and I'm using this as my title. I added foam behind it to help draw the eye to it. I found some really sweet little wooden bees in my stash to I scattered a few of those on the page too.
I have a mini stencil by Creative Expressions called 'Honeycomb' which works really well with my hexagon theme, so I pulled that out along with a Distress Ink in 'Mustard Seed' and added a few individual hexagons around the patterned paper hexagons. I used a blending brush to add the colour through the stencil, and then used a black gel pen to trace the outline of the hexagon to help them 'pop'.
There is a piece in the ephemera pack with a gorgeous beehive on it that I really wanted to use, so I fussy cut the beehive and stuck it to the right of my title, dangling down, raised on foam pads.
At this point, I decided I wanted to have a border around the edge of my layout. I was going for a minimal look with plenty of white space on this layout, but I felt like the layout needing framing, and using patterned paper is a great way to do this. I always 'gut' the middle of the patterned paper to preserve that for another layout, then trim down my white cardstock by about 1/4 inch on all sides, and then adhere that to the frame. Obviously this is me - so I distress all the edges of the white cardstock too for a bit more texture. I then finished the edge of the layout off with a black doodled border.
I wanted to add a little bit of sparkle to my layout so I pulled out some sequins from my stash - they have a lovely woodgrain pattern on them to match the 'Buzzing By' patterned paper. I scattered a few around the layout and that was me finished!
Thanks for stopping by to have a read - if you'd like to watch the layout come together then there is a process video up on my YouTube channel, which you can find here.
I'll be back later in the month with another 'Sweet as Honey' layout so until then,
Take care
Rebecca x
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