You Are Loved Layout

Hi!

Hope you are having a wonderful day! I'm here today to share with you my first layout as the October 2020 Guest Designer for A Cherry On Top. I was given a $50 gift certificate to choose products from the store and I ordered The Avenue collection by Jen Hadfield for Pebbles because it is so versatile, giving me more options to work with. This collection is gorgeous, I love the amazing color palette and the variety of designs, including florals and butterflies. This collection is great to make projects of all themes and is full of beautiful embellishments from die cuts, stickers, and alphas.

For this layout I started by selecting the papers I was going to use, and those are: Fifth Ave., Flower Dr., Wildflower Wy., Dahlia Dr., and Lovers Ln. Since my daughter was wearing a white shirt, this gives me the opportunity to use any color palette I want and I decided to use the wood grain background, orange/peach, blue, black, white, pink, cream, yellow, and gold. Because this collection is full of flowers and I love to use them in my layouts, I decided to stay with the palette of colors in the flowers when I was choosing the papers.

When cutting the papers, I saw one of them had a barcode stripe that had black scallops on it. I used my scissor and fuzzy cut around the scallops to make it look like a punched stripe. You can see it under the photos. Always check your barcode stripes before throwing them away, if they are full 1/2" x 12" they usually can be added to a project!

To give the papers some texture, I distressed their edges before adding them to the woodgrain paper. Once the papers were in place, I made a stitched border around the layout using my sewing machine and a yellow/gold thread. After that, I added paint splatters using black acrylic paint diluted in water and gold paint from Shimmerz (Miner, Miner 49er) also diluted in water.

When the paint was dry, I added the two photos matted in the black and white paper. I matted them individually, then I arranged them in the layout. After that, I started embellishing the layout using the flowers, leaves and branches from the floral die cut pack. Since those die cuts had a thick white border, I fuzzy cut them with the precision scissor to leave a thin white border. 

I love to fuzzy cut, so I sat on the couch and fuzzy cut the complete floral package for future layouts. I know this is time consuming but I don't like the look of having the thick white border. For me, the thin border makes the flowers look more elegant and realistic.

To add dimension to the layout, I added all the flowers using foam adhesive 1/16" thick. For more interest, I added the puffy hearts and leaves stickers from the collection into the clusters. I love those stickers, they are gorgeous, giving the layout an elegant and delicate addition. The title is an American Crafts Thicker from the collection named 2nd Ave. This pack is amazing, lots of title options and great sizes! For the journaling I made lines using the T-ruler and a Zig Memory System Millenium pen size .01.

The final detail added to the page, were the butterflies. I fuzzy cut them from one of the papers. There are a few butterflies in the die cut pack, but they are big. The ones I fuzzy cut from the paper and used in the layout are smaller, which works great in the page to be a pretty detail without distracting.

Thanks for your visit, hope you like this layout and it inspires you to craft! Come back soon for another layout this week using this collection. I'll be doing my best to record the process and make a video.