Laura Vegas

We've been sharing more CHA projects from our design team over on the Bella Blvd blog this week. This is our second "Inspiration Week" feature, and will have one more week later in February. If you'd like to see the new collections in action, head on over and see what our designers created with them!

I thought I would share my last CHA project with you all today. I really limited my project count this CHA because of the timing, so I only created four layouts for the show. This layout was created with the Lucky Starz collection. This collection has a great tone-on-tone star patterned paper (I used the aqua for my background paper), in eleven bright and fun colors, with great everyday patterns on the backsides. I chose a more subtle, softer color scheme for this layout, by sticking to aquas, yellows, greens, and pinks.

Because I had only received one sheet of each patterned paper to work with, I wanted to make it last. So instead of using a full sheet of the aqua star paper for my background (which I would rarely do anyways), I cut four one inch strips to miter together around the outside edge of a scrap piece of cardstock. This gives the illusion of being a full sheet of paper, while using only a third of a sheet. I shared this little trick HERE, if you want to get a better idea of what I'm talking about.

Once I had a photo picked out to use, I arranged it where I wanted it on the page, and then started layering small pieces of patterned paper and die cut cards all around it. This is a great way to use LOTS of different patterned papers, without overwhelming the page. A few of the Lucky Starz patterned papers have 3×4" cards on the backside, perfecty for journaling and such. I used a few of these, since they have great grid patterns.

I also picked out several 2×2", 3×4", and even a 4×6" card from the Candid Cards package to layer in with the other pieces of patterned paper. I won't lie. I spent forever pushing these papers and cards around, trying to come up with a pleasing pattern, while getting colors evenly spaced out. I even took cell phone pics along the way, since I would forget what went where once I started adhering pieces.

Once I had all of the papers and my photo in place and adhere down, I started embellishing. I started by adding some torn pieces of designer tape to quite a few of the papers, coordinating the tape with the paper. Pink tape with pink paper, green tape with green paper, yellow tape with yellow paper, etc.

After adding all of the designer tape pieces, I spent what seemed like forever and a day adding my machine stitching. It's one thing to quickly sew a few straight lines. It's a bit slower process to add lots of small lines of stitching, all over the page. But always worth it, I think.

The last step was to add some "extras" to the page. I tried to keep everything pretty monocramatic. Keeping the embellishments the same colors as the papers I was placing them on. I tucked a few coordinating feathers under my photo, added some chipboard pieces here and there, and added some threaded buttons as well.