Mintay Papers Wildwood Secrets - Embrace Nature

Hello! Karen here, ready to share a new layout. I'm so excited to be working with Mintay's new Wildwood Secrets collection – it's beautiful!

If you're like me and love countryside walks, this collection is made for you. It's spot-on for scrapbooking all your outdoor adventures, nature strolls, and woodland memories. The collection's theme is the forest/woods, with a gorgeous, warm, and organic colour palette. Think mossy greens, soft browns, natural tones, and a vibrant pop of red. Plus, it's filled with beautiful images of woodland creatures, wild strawberries, mushrooms, and other forest details.

To start this layout, I took a sheet of smooth white cardstock. Then, I used a mini brayer to spread some green acrylic paint right in the middle. 

Using a brayer with a good, thick paint creates wonderful texture, which I just love for adding dimension to my backgrounds.

When the green paint was dry, I also splatted some white paint on top. 

I wanted to frame my layout with a wide green border. Usually, I'd just trim my white cardstock down and mount it on a larger piece of green card. But this time, I gutted a 12x12 sheet of green cardstock to create a 1-inch frame. This let me position the frame directly on top of my white cardstock, giving me the flexibility to perfectly centre it around the painted area before I committed to sticking it down. 

Next, I took my 5x3.5 inch photo and matted it with a piece of patterned paper #5, leaving just a narrow border. As paper #5 is red this helps the photo really stand out. Then, I placed the matted photo onto my layout, overlapping a piece of green patterned paper from the 6x8 add-on paper pad.

Next, I turned to the paper die-cuts pack to add some embellishments. I arranged these in clusters, placing one on each of two corners of my photo. My choices weren't random – I specifically picked wild strawberry die-cuts to pick up on the red paper I used to mat the photo. 

Alongside these, I added images of a deer, a bird, and a ladybird on a log. These elements highlight the woodland theme of both my photograph and the overall design.

I added a delicate dragonfly die-cut near the top of the layout and to add more texture, I used my sewing machine and white thread to straight stitch around the edge of the white cardstock.

I created the title "Embrace Nature" by placing green mini alphabet stickers from my stash (for "Embrace") above the word "Nature" from the 6x12 sticker sheet.

I also added a couple of word strips from the sticker sheet near the bottom of the layout.

I printed the date and place onto white cardstock and placed it near the bottom of the layout.

Finally to give the layout a bit of sparkle I scattered some green and cream sequins here and there.

Thanks so much for checking out this post! If you're interested in grabbing any of the supplies I used, you can find them in the shop together with several other brand new collections from Mintay Papers.

Until next time, Take Care. Karen    x x