I hope you have survived the Halloween weekend. Here in Norway we have somewhat adopted the tradition…  I am so excited today to share with you my first layout with the October Kits.

For this page I wanted to increase the effect on a few of the colors in the kits.  I started up by just using mostly the ripe persimmon distress stains. The good and bad thing about using distress stains for this is that when you add water something happens… So i used a waterbrush to add water and more color, both more distress stains and drops of other mist colors.  Then I started stamping before using a black inkpad with one of the stencils in the October Color kit.

I found the colors to be a little too heavy so next step was to add some heavy gesso with the other stencil in the October Color kit.  Gesso is a great way to tone down a background. Often you don’t want to background to take the focus away from the rest of the layout too much.

When I work with layers I always want to use pieces to avoid too many straight lines. The background is one, but also rounded papers, borders, die cuts and pieces cut out with my Silhouette (guess what I still have the original from 2008-2009….)  You can see on the left side of the pictures that I have tucked in a partial strip of the  cut files made by Kim Watson.

Here are a few more details with the kit. I really love the fall colors in the kit.