Hi everyone… I’m excited to be back today with my second project as the April Hip Kit Club guest designer.  While I truly love documenting my kids and our family life it dawned on me the other day that it has been years (!!) since I had scrapped our other little family members: the pets.  We’re “cat people” and have three orange guys to love and drive us nuts and they most definitely are a huge part of our family.  So this layout shows off our handsome old boy.  He is indeed a Happy Cat.

I am almost always first inspired by the colors in my photos and the orange and neutrals in these ones drove me to pick up the grays, yellows, oranges, and reds from the April kit.  I really was drawn to the gray and white striped paper as a background but wanted to tone down the busyness so I chose to stitch a layer of vellum over the center.  

Sometimes when I start my search for appropriate embellishments I need to look outside the box.  I start by pulling out anything from the kit that fits my color palette and work from there.  This way I narrow down my choices a bit.  Not all colors and patterns are a perfect fit, though, and you can usually find even more that will work when you trim it down some (like the “you make me happy square” that was bordered with a different color) or pick and choose from a pattern.  The red wheel circles were cut from a multicolored sheet in the 6 x 6 pad and only one of them is a full circle.  I simply tucked the edges under other layers so you can’t tell.  

When working with color as inspiration it’s also useful to make your own additions.  I used the awesome Heidi Swapp watercolor papers and Prima watercolor pencils from the April Color Kit to create the yellow and orange hole-punched mat under my photos.

Thanks for joining me today!