Oh Boy

Hello, its Melissa and I'm so excited to be back with you again.  Today I have a layout to share, and I set myself a challenge to scrap an older photo of my son as a baby with a relatively girly cut file.  I adore this photo, I've had it printed off for years, but I've never been inspired to scrap it.  As soon as I saw the Social Butterfly cut file I knew I had to use it for this photo.

I used the 8.5 x 11 version of this cut file with Cocoa Vanilla Studio's "Make A Wish" collection.
In order to carry on with the boy theme, I limited myself to a predominately monochromatic colour scheme of blue and white.

I wrote my journaling on a tag and hung it off one of the butterflies wings.

I love that the butterflies don't cover the entire background.  For me its a challenge to leave a cut file plain white and not backed with patterned paper, but I love how it looks!

And here is the cut file.

Thanks so much for looking

Social Media?

Happy Monday Cut Shoppe friends! I'm here with a favorite background from The Cut Shoppe Etsy store, the Very Squarey cut file which includes both 12x12 and 8.5x11 sizes:

The title of this page is a bit tongue-in-cheek, and pokes fun at the five cousins in the photo below. It's Christmas day and there they are, sitting side by side, totally engrossed in what is on the devices in front of them. Maybe they are communicating by text?! ;)

I thought that the Very Squarey cut file would be perfect for my background, with the squares representing the many screens (laptops, smart phones, ipads, etc.) that sometimes seem to take the place of face-to-face conversations. Adding snippets of text was an afterthought, but totally appropos.

Although I could have gone my favorite route, all out colorful, when backing the cuts, I thought monochromatic would be a better option. A somewhat busy black and white photo certainly didn't need the competition!

Many of the same papers were repeated in the center for my all-in-one photo/title/journaling mat, which corrals the aforementioned elements, preventing them from getting lost on my page.

The question remains. When having a family gathering, should we put a basket by the door with a sign that says "Deposit all phones HERE!"? What do you think? ;)