Soaking Up the Sunshine from Top to Toe

Do you ever have times when you're working on a layout and you think to yourself, "This is taking forever - what's wrong with me?!" and then you have days when you think to yourself, "I've been at this for hours - I love it!"  Well, this new layout is totally that second one - guess I was just really feeling the creative groove yesterday.

Soaking Up the Sunshine from Top to Toe

The inspiration for this layout came from one of the starting points from Shimelle's Hitchhiker's Guide to Scrapbooking class, which I'm currently working my way through.  I have a particular weakness for designs that use layered up stripes of patterned paper; it's one of my favourite designs that I'm happy to go back to and scraplift repeatedly.  The colour scheme inspiration for this page actually came from one of the photos I took at this beach, that featured the pretty sun umbrellas in a soft, candy floss pink, which lead to the monochromatic palette.  I knew I wanted to use a variety of arrows but the heart motif that repeats around the page was complete serendipity again (until I realised just how much had hearts on it and then I ran with it).

I actually started first by designing the central embellishment for the page - the twine flower sun.  The lovely cream/gold twine was actually sent to me in a package and I paired it with some gold sewing thread in my stash.  Then I used this tutorial to create the twine flower, layered up a patterned MME brad through the eyes of a shiny yellow button and popped it on top of the flower.

Then I got to work on the page design.  At first I didn't think I had much soft pink in my stash but to my surprise, I actually had more than enough and decided to use up those scraps.  The original starting point was quite linear and I wanted this page to have a breezier, airy feel about it so I tilted the paper stripes and staggered their heights and layered the washi tape borders underneath the stripes so it just peeks out here and there.  Since I wanted the sun to be the focus of the design, I separated out the photos and got to work on that long title (there is something wonderful about long titles, isn't there?).

Finally, embellishment clusters.  I used a variety of Amy Tan/AC, EP, MME, BG and Simple Stories items and I punched little gold hearts from some gold ribbon tape, also saved from the same package as the twine - I seriously need to buy myself some of that.  I also discovered the cute banner paper from EP's Hello Summer collection features a number of pink banners, including one that reads, "I have sunshine in my heart today." - perfect!  Snipped those out and layered up with some dimension on the top, then used an Amy Tan/AC branding stripe with adorable pink hearts to ground the page.

I haz a happy.  <3