Snow Wonder - Simple Stories - Simple Vintage Winter Woods Collection

Hello, and Happy New Year! It's Rebecca with you today with my first layout of 2023. I am so excited to be working with the beautiful 'Simple Vintage Winter Woods' collection from Simple Stories this month. It's a beautiful, wintry collection, and perfect for some recent photos I took of my little boy in the snow. You can shop the collection here.

In my photos, my son is wearing a coat that matches this collection really well - so I decided to use this to my advantage and use it to inspire my colour palette. I've gone for the soft browns and minty colours which feature in the collection. I started with the Frosty Friends patterned paper, and cut a section about 8 inches wide, tearing the bottom at an angle to bring a bit of texture to the page. I matted this patterned paper with a sheet of the minty coloured cardstock from the 12x12 Basics Kit. I also chose to matt my photos with this same cardstock. 

Knowing that my title would likely be the biggest piece on the layout, I wanted to get it in place early on. I've used one of the Foam Stickers and some thickers from my stash. I absolutely adore the foam stickers in the Simple Stories collections. The titles are always written in lovely fonts, and they are so easy to use.

With my title in place, I moved on to embellishing. There are two ephemera packs in this collection - the Bits & Pieces and Woodland Bits & Pieces. Both packs are full of beautiful die cuts, perfect for any winter layout. I've used lots of the snowflakes from the Woodland Bits & Pieces, arranging them going diagonally through my title and photos.

I've placed a couple of the calendar-style cards behind my photos - distressing the edges to make them a bit more 'rustic', and also stapling them together. I love using staples on layouts - they bring a new texture to the page and it's much more interesting than just gluing things together! 

I've further embellished the layout with some tree stickers from the Combo Stickers sheet, and some birds and branches from the Woodland Bits & Pieces.

I got to this point in my creative process, and couldn't decide if to adhere everything to a white background or a coloured cardstock background. I tried both out, before deciding on the darker, coloured cardstock. To this cardstock, I added some subtle stencilling using a distress ink and the Winter Snow stencil and some white splatters.

Thanks for reading! I really love how this layout turned out. It's a beautiful collection and one of my recent favourites. If you'd like to watch this layout come together, there is a process video up on my YouTube channel which you can find here.

I'll be back later in the month with my second layout using this stunning collection.

Take care

Rebecca x

@preciouspagespapercraft