Party Time | Cut to You

Hi everyone!

I was so happy to be asked by Gwen to participate as a guest designer for Cut to You as part of their 1st birthday celebrations last month. This is the second layout I created, and was inspired by the July inspiration board, which (funnily enough) had a bit of a celebration theme to it.  

I was initially drawn to the pink & blue colour palette from this pretty board, so I used that as my starting point, choosing the 'More Than Words' collection from Cocoa Vanilla Studio as the basis for my page.

I chose to document a photo of some of my best scrappy friends and I that was taken on our annual weekend away, when we rent a house and then eat, drink and craft all weekend.(It's affectionately known as our "Bitches" weekend. hehe) This is a photo of us that was taken during a trip to a local craft store - right before we went in and shopped up a storm. (They didn't know what had hit them!) 

I began with a pretty pink watercolour style paper for my background, layering it with a small paper doily and pieces of black & white floral and blue & white stripe patterned papers before adding my photo on top.

Next, I chose the 'Let's Party' file, that was sent as a free file recently to CTY newsletter subscribers (so if you haven't signed up for the newsletter yet make sure you do - nobody likes missing out! You can sign up HERE) I cut the file from white cardstock and then coloured it using 'Tumbled Glass' Distress Oxide and added it to my page above the layered papers.

Once the photo mat and my title were in place, it was time to embellish my page. First, I added a small label where I wrote my (tongue-in-cheek) journalling; then began embellishing my page with a sweet little banner chipboard sticker below it. Inspired by the board, I wanted to focus on butterflies as my primary embellishment.

For my first cluster, I chose a flower from the 'More Than Words' chipboard sticker sheet; a small punched paper flower (with an enamel dot centre); and then one of the butterflies from the 'Mixed Butterflies' set. (These are my absolute favourite CTY files!) The butterfly was cut from white cardstock and then coloured with 'Spun Sugar' Distress Oxide. To give it some extra dimension I placed a row of pearls along the body and lifted the wings up from the page.

For my second cluster, I started with a floral die cut from the 'More Than Words' ephemera pack, which I layered with the happiness label from the same pack and another small punched flower. Below those, I added a second butterfly from the 'Mixed Butterflies' cut file set, which was again ct from white cardstock and coloured with Distress Oxide. This time, instead of a row of pearls, I added a small fussy cut butterfly from one of the Cocoa Vanilla patterned papers layered over the top.

To complete my "visual triangle" and finish off my page; I added a third butterfly from the 'Mixed Butterflies' set, which I inked with 'Tumbled Glass' Distress Oxide to match my title and placed on the bottom right corner of my photo. I also added a couple of enamel dots to the body for dimension. Below it, I added another fussy cut butterfly (the same as I had used on the layered butterfly); and then, because I had to have three, I added a final one near the top of my page.

The finishing touch was to stamp the word "priorities" a few times around my page and stamp the date in the bottom corner.

Thanks so much to Gwen for asking me to be part of the birthday celebrations. I loved being able to share how I use some of my Cut to You files and hope I have inspired you.

Until next time, happy scrapping! X