Sunshine & Happiness

The weather has finally cheered up for summer where I am, and Simple Stories’ new collection ‘Sunshine & Happiness’ really brings the sunshine into the scrapping room with it’s bright colours and summery sentiments. I used the collection pack this month, which comes with two 12×12 sticker sheets as well as the full page papers and cut apart designs, along with the 4×6 sticker book, bradz and die cuts. You can find the whole collection in the Hey Little Magpie shop here:
Simple Stories – Sunshine and Happiness


I worked “backwards” this month for a change, and made my first page before drawing a sketch from it, then used that sketch as a leaping point for my second page. It was quite a nice way to work, and you could also go back retrospecively and make sketches from some old layouts to use in creating new ones. I found that stripping a page back to it’s basic sketch layout made it easier to use as a starting point than simply putting the layout itself in front of me for inspiration. It allowed me to see past the colours and photo and specific shapes.
This page has a photo from 2014, when my daughter turned 10 months old. The dress that she wore for her monthly pictures that month matched this collection so well that I couldnt not use it! The journalling from this day – what size she was, how she was developing, her likes and dislikes etc – is already captured on other pages with the same set of photos, so it wasn’t necessary to include it all again. It was fun to read back on though, as my youngest son is just a month older than this now, and doing very different things.
 

I used thin strips of paper to create a varied edge around the whole page, and added a bit of glitter washi tape from Amy Tangerine Better Together. I made a little flag banner to go across the page from pieces of patterned paper folded, cut into flag shapes and stapled on to twine. Each flag is fixed in place with a foam square, because they just weren’t staying where I wanted them to! I added stickers and die cuts, a few gems and some of the gorgeous backless bradz from the collection.

The second page evolved from the first, and using the sketch allowed me to see the banner simply as a diagonal element rather than definitely a banner. In a rotated version of the page, and it’s place I made a feature of triangles cascading down towards my photo. I created three varying sized templates from card and drew round them lightly with pencil on my background paper, holding the photo roughly in place. then I cut them out with a craft knife and backed each one with patterned paper. You could do the same thing with a die cutting machine I suppose, but I don’t have one so it’s handcutting for me and it really is very simple to do.

This is a recent picture from just a couple of weeks ago, when we had one of the first properly sunny and warm days of the year! It always feels nice to scrap really current photos like this, but I’m never organised enough to get proper prints done that quickly, so I rely on my home printer when I feel the urge to get something down on paper. It prints at 6×4″ so I just cut this one down to a 4″ square.


I added some heart stickers and die cuts, some of foam squares for dimension, and some spots of perfect pearls along with some descriptive phrase stickers and the important facts – date and place. The words “hello sunshine” were printed directly onto the yellow background paper, and whilst I didnt make a border all the way around the page this time, I did keep a strip along the bottom. This partially covered the words though, so I used a knife to cut around the letters that were covered and overlapped them on top of the paper. This also serves to keep everything connected on the page and help it to flow easy to the eye.
Here’s hoping for plenty more summer days to come, and lots of reason for me to use all of those summery phrases!
See you next month, Jen