The
photo I used was of my daughter and her best friend. The colors in the photo were soft – so I didn’t want to overwhelm the picture with a lot of bold bright colors and patterns. I used white cardstock for the background, but I found that a bit harsh. So, I used some Mister Huey’s Water Cooler Mist to give a blue tint to the white cardstock. I sprayed in the upper left hand and lower right hand corners so that they eye would move easily from the top of the page to the bottom. There is a lot of grey in my photo – so I felt that I needed some soft black accents to ground my page. (the banner at the top, the black alphas in the title and the black and white borders toward the bottom). This kind of explains the method I used to design my basic layout. Next, was the fun part… embellishments!
I hand cut the banner at the top of the page out of the Dear Lizzy Dreamy Days paper. I inked around the edges of each piece and stitched them to my layout. I didn’t adhere the entire banner because I wanted the edges to flip up for a little extra texture. 
I layered several different patterned papers to create the the border. This gave my page a horizontal line that helped anchor the main parts of my layout to the rest of the page. It helped pull the eye across and downward just like reading a book. I also wanted to give some weight to the lower right corner of my page with a cluster of embellishments. I used a combination of stickers, alphabet & veneer butterflies from our main kit along with chipboard elements & ribbon from our August Embellishment Add-On Kit. This combination has tons of dimension and texture, and it all flows together because each item is connected to another and none of them are floating.
I love the woodgrain Thickers! The whimsical scripted font was perfect for my layout. They gave texture, dimension and detail to the 2nd part of my title. Combined with the black alphabet stickers from Echo Park – the title is really eye catching. I stamped the wood veneer butterfly using a texture stamp that was included in our March 2012 Embellishment Add-On Kit. This gave it a nice little detail. :D Finally, I hand cut a few clouds from the Echo Park Everyday Eclectic paper. I inked around the edges of each piece with brown ink, and machine stitched along the bottom of them for more detail. Since things look better in 3’s, I added 3 clusters of clouds throughout the top of my page.
