Laura Vegas

On the Bella Blvd blog today, we are continuing our Endless Inspiration Week, sharing tons of booth projects from CHA. Today, we are focusing on our Designer Tape and Button Market collections. We have added new colors/designs/patterns to both the tapes and the buttons, and asked some of the designers to show off some fun ways to use them. 

When I started working on my assigned Button Market layout for CHA, I originally had a summery photo printed out for it (which then got moved to another layout), and lots of colorful plastic buttons pulled out of my Bella button stash. I was going to create a wavy button border along my page, to go with the summer theme. Then, with a last minute change in the catalog planning, I had to switch my focus to the wood buttons and mixes. I decided to move ahead with my wavy button border anyways.

Because there are quite a few wooden buttons that have black on them, I wanted to make sure I had a good amount of black on my page to tie in with the buttons. I built my page on a sheet of the Oreo Sprinkles & Lace patterned paper from the Sophisticates collection. I choose the aqua Turkey Tracks (how cute a name is that for a paper?) patterned paper from the new Thankful collection for the bottom of the page, and freehand cut a wavy line across the paper.

Then I just started arranging buttons along the wave, mixing lots of wood buttons along with a few plastic buttons and buttons from the mixed packs. I tried to stick to a certain color scheme, with the black, red, green, aqua, and yellows. I do take the time to thread each button, because I like the finished look it gives when adhered to the page. Just a personal preference. I thread them, and then add them to the page with a glue dot. I am not patient enough to actually thread them ONTO the page.

I choose this photo of Alyssa, not just because I love it, but also because she was wearing black, which tied in with the page. To add a bit more color to the page, I pulled out some papers in colors to match the buttons. Red from the Sophisticates collection, green from the Birthday Boy collection, and yellow from the Birthday Girl collection. I cut them into strips of varying widths and lengths, and then machine stitched around the edges, before layering them behind my photo.

After adding my title and journaling, I still had a bit of empty space on the top right corner of the page. I wanted to add another touch of color to the page, so I picked out some chipboard accents to add. Designer after-thought: I am sitting here typing this blog post, and writing about my layout, and I just literally said this out loud as I typed: "Is that an ORANGE star?!?!?!". I had to scroll up to look at my full layout, and I DO see a little orange star button. Must have made sense at the time. Just seemed very random, as I'm looking at it now. Lol.

Visit the Bella Blvd blog, where you can see more ideas using the buttons and also the designer tapes. And check back tomorrow, when we will focus on the new Thankful collection.