This time of year is full of sense memories for me, taking me back to my childhood summers: flower-laden vines curling toward blue skies, soft green grass cooling bare feet, and red volcanic soil creeping into ears and nostrils and between toes and even in belly buttons. So maybe that last memory is not as idyllic as the first two, but the layout below attests to its accuracy.
Yes, those are a pair of very dirty underwear that my cousin is proudly displaying. What can I say? We played hard.
To capture the summery vibe on this page and create a background fitting for such a silly photo, I went for bold and bright colors, with some help from the July 2018 Hip Kit Club Color Kit, which contains the new Pinkfresh Studio liquid watercolors. I painted circles with water on white cardstock, and then added droplets of color. When the background dried (helped along with a heat tool), it was a bit crinkly, so I had it sit under a large, heavy book until it became smoother.
I then turned my attention to creating some machine-stitched page elements. First, I pieced together a photo mat using strips and blocks of patterned paper from the July 2018 main kit, along with small pieces of double-stick tape, and then stitched over it with a freehand approach, turning it now and then to create loops and curves.
Next, I hand-cut one of the scalloped rows from a piece of exclusive “Chasing Rainbows” Hip Kit Club paper, and added machine-stitching back and forth across each of the scallops. Messy stitching adds so much charm to a page — again, don’t worry about precision! After stitching the scalloped row, I tucked it under the photo mat, and a few more elements to the page, including the journaling and some summery accents.
(Tip: to change the color of an acrylic word like the one used in the title, brush some glaze over it, drip some yellow paint over that, and then use a brush to blend and smooth the color over the surface.)
Everything about this page feels like summer to me, bringing me back to the red dirt adventures of my youth.
