Fantastic February Frolics

It’s time for another page sketch here on the Hey Little Magpie blog and this month I have a single photo sketch for you, although you will see I have also adapted it to use two photos on one of my pages below. I have used plenty of lovely new goodies from the shop, including pieces from the following collections:
American Crafts – Shimelle – Starshine
American Crafts – Dear Lizzy – Happy Place
American Crafts – Amy Tan – Better Together
Crate Paper – Little You


Five. Yup, family portraits get trickier the more kids you involve, and this was our first as a family of five. The smallest one was just 3 days old here and happily snoozing away, and the biggest one was big enough to understand a bribe, but the middle one was trouble! I stuck fairly closely to the sketch here, although I didn’t use a solid design strip down the lefthand side, choosing instead to replace it with multiple diamond shapes cut from various papers. I made a little template from a piece of card and simply drew around it onto my patterned paper to get them all the same size. The diamonds were adhered in the centre and then curled up at the top and bottom to add dimension.


Those beautiful crackled cork hearts are from the Pink Paislee C’est La Vie collection, and the teeny tiny stars can be found in the shop here.

This time I adapated the sketch to include two photos. I knew I wanted to use the star trails paper design from Starshine because I loved the feeling of movement in the pattern and it seemed right for these photos of kids running around and around in circles chasing their grandma! The background sheet is from Happy Place and although it uses a white base and starshine uses cream as a collection, the two fit together nicely. I played around with adding a solid strip down the left, as per the sketch, but it just hid too much of those lovely stripes, so I opted instead to let them show and added a thin vertical line in it’s place.


I pulled in a few embellishments that were hanging around on my desk – a big brad design from Simple Stories Enchanted, a vellum heart from Studio Calico, word stickers from Amy Tan and some puffy stickers from Heidi Swapp. I initially didn’t have the cluster in the top right corner at all, but the page just wouldn’t balance properly to my eye so I added it in. Sometimes you have to go a bit off plan (or off sketch!) to get things looking right, even if a certain configuration has worked before. That’s part of the fun!

For this, one of my favourite photos, I rotated the sketch by 90 degrees and placed a solid strip of paper across the bottom of the page. Both the starry background from Shimelle and the sleepy clouds from Crate Paper were just perfect and had to be included! To really frame the photo and keep it the focus of the page I added dots of white all the way around and twine around the mat too. Most of my photos are phone snaps these days, and I do wish I would find the time more often to get my SLR out, but I have captured so many precious and fleeting moments on my phone so I am grateful for that. I would never have gone downstairs to get my camera to get this picture, but I adore it!


These multicoloured Thickers from Shimelle’s collection are just awesome and I love them! There are also some gorgeous cut apart papers in the range, and I used quite a few pieces on my three layouts – they are very usable designs ideal for layering and creating clusters. This is definitely my favourite collection of Shimelle’s yet and I can see myself using it up (which is saying something for me!) down to the last little pieces. I love it when you happen upon a collection that makes you feel like that.
Thanks for stopping by!