She's Fab / Simple Stories

Happy Monday, friends!  Today is a Teacher Work Day for my girls, so they have a 3-day weekend going on over here.  At least that means things are less rushed for me...yay!  Today I wanted to share my second monthly layout for Simple Stories.  Again, I used the beautiful The Reset Girl collection.  I was immediately inspired by this gorgeous & colorful triangle/square patterned paper.  The whole sheet is like that, and I felt like I needed to cut those squares up and form a shape.  Naturally, I went with a heart :)  Since the squares had a lot of chocolate brown mixed in, I went with a brown patterned paper background.  That's pretty different for me, but I love how those colors pop right off of it.  I used this photo of Reese because she's wearing a brown shirt (and showing off her gums...haha) and the colors just went with it.  I didn't want a black & white photo for this, so I was able to pull the brown out of the photo with these papers.

Since there is a lot of pattern & color going on, I was careful about what else I chose to add to the layout.  I fussy cut these FAB letters from a patterned paper and added some of those circle alphas to create my title.  I did add a few tangled thread spots, a few stickers and a few clear stickers.

I did a minimal amount of mixed media on this page because I felt like it didn't need a whole lot.  Under my photo, I smudged some white gesso and added a bit of blue Shimmerz just to add a bit of messy color under there and to separate the photo from the background a bit more.  I also layered some papers and other bits under the photo as well as that fussy cut flower cluster.

Here you can see the gesso and blue Shimmerz just peeking out from the top of the picture.  I love how the clear stickers look on the squares...and they're brown!  Too perfect.  I flipped up the edges of some of the squares for some dimension, and you can see where I used gold and pink thread to machine stitch around the entire heart.

I decided to punch a few large hearts from patterned papers to form another cluster in the top area.  These papers are more of a solid, so they stood out and didn't make the layout "busier."  I stitched around those as well and added even more thread and clear stickers.

I hope this gives you some ideas on what you can do with some of those awesome yet busy patterned papers.  Cut them up or use them in a fun way like this...I love how this turned out, and it was pretty easy to do.

Thanks so much for stopping by!  Make sure to check out all the new Simple Stories releases if you haven't already.  They're all amazing!