"Explore" with Kira

Hello crafty friends!  I am so excited to be here with my first layout on The Cut Shoppe design team!  I have to be honest with you though...it was REALLY hard to chose a cut file to use for this layout.  I literally wanted to use them all!

I was feeling some strong autumn vibes when I was creating this though.  So I narrowed it down to "leaves", which was still a very tough decision because there are a few leaf themed cut files in the shop.  The Autumn Acres cut file though?!  It spoke to my autumn-loving-pumpkin-patch-visiting soul.

I decided to cut two of the same shaped leaves, and did them in slightly different sizes (about a 1/2" difference).  And the most obvious thing to do at this point would be to go through my scraps to back the leaves with pattern paper.  But instead I went to Hobby Lobby and bought $45 worth of new paper to create my perfect color palette.  I wanted something autumn-ish, but in a more non-traditional sense.  My current favorite autumn color palette is cobalt blue, aqua, deep reds with pops of orange and yellow.

Each leaf "section" was backed in a different color/pattern and some were even left open so the background paper could peek through.  My photo (which is a picture of my son at the apple farm last year, pointing at an old vintage truck in the middle of a field...I mean, how much more "fall" can you get?!) is nestled under one of the leaves and on top of the other in a sort of diagonal design.

The title is an acrylic piece that says "explore" from Bella Blvd.  I used some burnt orange embroidery floss to create the look as if it is stitched on the page.  At this point I felt like my layout was almost complete, the leaves had really done most of the work for me as far as embellishing goes.  I used a couple phrase stickers and then decided to add in a few more leaves.

The small leaves on the left side of the page are from another cut file you can purchase in the shop.  It's called Funky Florals.  (Full disclosure:  my original idea was to use the florals and leaves from this cut file and I had backed a ton of them and then changed my mind about 2 hours in...as any sane person does.  Ugh.)  Anyway, I used a few of the leaves I had already backed with pattern paper and created the illusion that they were falling from the autumn trees.

I finished the layout off with some gold Heidi Swapp color shine and a date stamp.  Thanks for stopping by and checking out my very first layout as part of this amazing design team!

Until next time,