Cupcake Party!

Hello and welcome to my blog! This month we had this fantastic double page sketch to work with at Stick It Down:

It's rather an unusual sketch, with the diagonal orientation and triangular photos! Although not what I would usually go for, I love sketches like this, as it gives fresh ideas and pushes you to try new things! I decided to keep my photos the traditional shape and interpreted the diagonal as keeping the photos in a straight orientation, but placing them on an incline from left to right. This made it very easy to include both vertical and horizontal photos without them becoming confusing to the eye.

I used a variety of different supplies, mixing old with new. The background paper is from the new Pinkfresh Studio line, Joyful Day. It might be considered a bit crazy for a background, but I just couldn't resist it! It's such a beautiful vibrant shade of purple, and one that my daughter absolutely loves, so it made sense to choose it for the layout documenting her birthday celebration!

I chose strips of patterned papers from the 6"x8" paper pad from the new One Canoe Two collection, Saturday Afternoon. I placed these horizontally across the double pages, overlapping, creating an area to mat the photos onto.

I chose five photos to include - this allowed enough room for a journaling card to be included. This came from a Crate Paper cut-apart sheet - I tried to match this and the embellishments to the patterned paper strips as much as I could, to create cohesion. This was important, because the photos were very colourful, and so was the background paper. So to avoid overwhelming the layout, I arranged the embellishments in a colour-coordinated fashion. The colours I chose - purple, green, pink, yellow and turquoise - are the main colours of the paper strips.

I created three embellishment clusters over the two pages. I used ephemeras, stickers, cut-apart sheets and phrase stickers from my stash. The alpha is from an older Dear Lizzy line - it doesn't stand out as much as I would have liked, but the layout was getting rather busy, and a thin alpha seemed to go really well with it, without competing for attention. The chose colours to go with the embellishment clusters.

I finished the layout with some Elle's Studio puffy hearts and Color Shine ink platters. I think this final detail really brought the layout together, creating cohesion.

Have you spotted the mistake I have made??? I washi taped the background papers together, and layered the paper strips on top. I took care to place the photos and embellishments so that they don't go over the join, but I forgot to pay attention to this when I wrote the date on. I photographed this layout before cutting the two pages apart. Once the two pages are separated and placed in an album on two sides of the D-ring binding, I don't think the date will make much sense! Silly me!

Hope you like my layout. Don't forget to visit the Stick It Down blog for more inspiration - there are some fantastic interpretations of this sketch from our design team! Thanks for visiting!