Relax / Hip Kit Club + News

Happy 2018, friends!  I hope you all are having a great start to the new year.  Before I talk about my first layout of the year, I wanted to share a few things.

After many, many months (a few years, even) of being on multiple design teams, I have decided to scale back.  This past year was jam packed with assignments, deadlines and just overall "hurry up and get this done so I can start the next one."  I was starting to get sick of it all, to put it mildly.  I felt overwhelmed and chained to my desk.  Something I love so dearly was turning into a chore.  While I felt it was an honor to serve on so many teams, it just consumed me and my time.  So to fix that, I have stepped down from over half my teams.  I stepped down from Bella Blvd back in October.  I wrapped up my time with Precious Remembrance Shop and Thermoweb.  I loved all of these teams, but I just couldn't keep up with the deadlines.  This will be my last month with Cocoa Vanilla Studio, which was a very hard decision to make.  I also stepped down from A Flair For Buttons, which was a team I was on for almost three years.

I will be remaining with the Paige Evans DT, Hip Kit Club and Shimmerz.  I also have the next few months booked with Guest Design spots.  I feel so much better about having more "me" time in my life.  I need more time with my girls and to just be free to do things outside of my craft room.  I want to love scrapbooking again, and I think backing away from so many deadlines will help with that.  I will still be creating and making process videos, and I will now have some time to scrap just for fun (hopefully) and use up some of my never ending mountain of stash!

Okay, so on to my project for today!  This is my latest layout for Hip Kit Club, and I used the 2017 December Hip Kits.  Our theme for Monday was to be inspired by Irit's papers, which was no problem at all because they're stunning!  I fussy cut her beautiful watercolor flowers out and started with those.  I wanted to layer them all around the photo.  I even fussy cut some of the Vicki Boutin packaging and used that above the photo.  I used some of the Turquoise Mist cardstock as my background.  I coated a lot of it with white gesso and then used several shades of blue and aqua Shimmerz over it.  I used the Vibez Snow Way Man from the Color Kit and a few more from my stash to get some different shades.

I decided to create a cluster just below the photo with a mix of fussy cut flowers and some Vicki Boutin die cuts.  I wrote my journaling on this die cut and added a few stamped sentiments from the Crate Paper Good Vibes stamp set.

These kits are really great for mixing and matching.  I added a Crate Paper die cut to the right of the photo and machine stitched around the edges.  I used a Vicki Boutin flower here and a fun Thicker for my title.

Here are some more Vicki Boutin goodies.  I added this leaf stem and I fussy cut this cute bird from one of the paper clips.

Those are Project Life cards under the photo...they're perfect for layering!

I added lots of adhesive foam under all of these pieces.  The dimension looks great, and I love the shadowing effect.

Here's one more look at the packaging I used.  Always take a closer look at the packaging because it can definitely be used as an embellishment!

Thanks so much for stopping by, and have a wonderful (and WARM) day!  Brrrrr!  Here's my process video if you want to check it out:

See you soon!