Hey friends and happy Halloween, it’s Kathleen here today and I am excited to share my first blogpost on the Hip Kit Club blog with you! For today’s project the task was to create something Halloween themed and use a cut file, both of which are things that don’t come very naturally to me.

And to be honest, I only had one set of photos that I could use for this layout. Since we don’t really celebrate Halloween (it’s not that popular in Germany, and even less if you don’t have kids 😉 ), I don’t have any of the typical Halloween photos that you would normally use. However, two years ago I created some Halloween-themed treat bags and gift boxes for my colleagues and their kids and I absolutely LOVED it! It is still one of my all-time favourite projects that I made to this date, so I decided to document that!

Let’s Get Spooky by Kathleen Graumüller

Since the focus today should be on using a cutfile, I decided to use this one with the spiderweb and the cut little spider. However, since I didn’t have any black cardstock and there wasn’t a dark enough patterned paper in the kits, I just used the Bazzill Blue Oasis cardstock from the October 2018 cardstock kit, cut the cutfiles out and then used a felt tip pen to paint them black.

As you can see, my two photos only have black, white, orange and purple in them. This is also what inspired the color scheme for this layout. Luckily, there are more than enough elements in the beautiful October 2018 kits in those colors!

To mat my photos, I used part of a patterned paper from the Main kit (for the upper one) and a journaling card from the Project Life kit (for the lower one). I also cut out the orange leaf from one of the PL cards to create a little cluster together with some of the Pink Paislee Whimsical flowers (from the Emebllishment kit).

For the mixed media-ish part behind my photos I used a mix of the Seedless Preserves Distress Oxide (from my stash) and the Wisteria Lane Shimmerz paint from last month. For the orange part I mixed the Pop Art Pink Vibez from this month’s Color Kit (one of my favorite paints ever!) with the Mustard Seed Vibez from last month.

The rest was then just embellishing and I was pleasantly surprised when I saw that the new Whimsical collection features a lot of crafty-themed sayings, icons and illustrations! And even better: some of them were even in the right colors – like the purple paint tubes I added to the left and underneath my photos or the phrase flags which I cut from Paper #8.

Finally, I added some enamel dots and paint splatters around the page, and of course: my title. Here I combined the golden chipboard Thickers from the October 2018 Embellishment kit with the small purple puffy alphas from the September 2018 Project Life kit, since all the other alphas this month didn’t fit my color scheme.

The final touch was a little bit of machine stitching at the top and bottom of my layout and my journaling. Oh, and of course I needed to add a golden string from which the spider could hang!

Although this layout was out of my comfort zone on so many levels (using a cutfile, the mixed media part on the background, Halloween themed, colors I don’t often use, … the list goes on, haha), I am very happy with how it turned out! And I hope it inspires you to create something with your October kits!

Thanks a lot for stopping by!

Have a spooky day and lots of fun trick-or-treating tonight 😉