Meaningful.


Hi there, I have the honor of joining The Reset Girl crew as a guest designer for December.  If you visit Cori's blog, you will find a little bio portion I put together, mixed with some fun facts about me that I am not including in my personal post, but you can read that here.

What an amazing treat I have to design for Cori this month.  I really love the brightly muted colors, and the fun patterns of the Meaningful Collection.  
  
For my layout, I had a mental sketch to work with, and began by choosing 2 cards from the kit; a decorative card for my title and a half blank card for my journaling.  The background was created with a stencil and acrylic paint.  I didn’t quite have a shade that precisely matched the teal in the collection, so I mixed two different paints from my stash and crossed my fingers that it would match.  I love when magic happens!  Being that this was a boy layout, I tried to pull in gender neutral colors, so I opted to add orange string and twine.  I used a background hexagon stamp from my stash, and paired that with Memento “London Fog” ink.  I also used the Meaningful stamp set to add a caption under the photo; “Precious Precious Life”. 


You may have also noticed the polka-dot clouds, and if not, then let’s take a closer look.  I am a huge fan of stretching your supplies; which includes using your packaging.  The clouds are actually the tissue that comes in your Reset Girl package.  As cute as that tissue is, and as much as I’d like to hoard it, I thought it would be fun to implement that in my layout.  I first glued a portion of the tissue to white cardstock, smoothed it out, and let it dry for a minute.  The glue I used is Nuvo adhesive by Tonic Studios, but any liquid glue or glue stick would work for this.  Using a Fiskars cloud punch; (which - incidentally - is a punch that Cori designed the “Punchable Clouds” for – you can find that in her Print & Snip Digital Shop), I carefully punched the polka-dot clouds and added them behind my base cards. 

As much as I love clean and simple layouts, I also love clusters.  

Clustering gives me LIFE!  
It’s like a puzzle, trying to fit different pieces, shapes and colors into a cohesive - yet messy bunch, so that it looks like it just effortlessly fell out of your hands and fused together perfectly on your project.  It’s my favorite part of the creative process.  

The cluster surrounding my journaling was made using twine & string, 1 white diecut from my stash (to add more texture and layering), 3 diecuts from the Meaningful Kit and some enamel dots.  





I sprinkled more enamel dots around the page, again, so that it appears to have fallen perfectly in those strategic spots; *lol*, and my last step was the Tonic Studios Nuvo white liquid drops.  Not too many, but just enough to add more interest and texture. 

The photo itself is of my son Giovanni when he was just about a year old.  Now that he’s 7, and is able to talk and has opinions on things, I’m noticing that he’s growing into his own little person.  He is very smart and very attentive and detailed (like his Mama – lol), but also he’s not a little tot anymore, and I almost feel like the last 5 years were stolen from me.  So I make it a point to spend quality time with him each evening, in bed, just chatting about whatever, having silly conversations and hearing his heart.  Because he was my miracle baby, and these are the meaningful moments I want to soak in and document. 

I hope you have been inspired by my story and my layout process.  As beautiful as the kits are and as much as we’d like to hoard them forever, they lose their value if they’re just left in a pouch to collect dust and admire.  We benefit more from our supplies, when we use what we have while we love and enjoy creating with it!
-AtStudioD

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