All Heart, it's fabulous!! | Rachel Millington

Hey Magpies, welcome to September! I chose the All Heart collection from Crate Paper to work with this month and I’ve got to say, I LOVED it! I was pretty late to the party with this collection, I had looked at it when it came out but I thought it was aimed at teenage girls and it wasn’t for me. But I started seeing people using it, specifically my friend Stacy who totally rocked it and I took a second look and went for it. I am so glad I did, it’s an amazing collection. I love the sort of random, boho style, it really grew on me, I made 8 layouts in the end and I love them all. I have 6 hanging together on the side of my Expedit unit and they look so cool together.

My first LO is a bit doodleishous! I took part in some summer challenges in August and one of the challenges was doodling so I got into it a bit. I’ve gone crazy on this LO! First up I used lots of the cool, frames from the Puffy Frames pack. They are such cool frames so I used the pale ones on my B&W photos and the darker pink one on the colour one. The pack comes with 5 frames of each colour, so there’s 10 in the packet. The only paper I used on this LO was a long banner behind all the frames.

I dotted around some of the words from the Puffy Phrase & Icons Stickers and also used one of the fabulous Acrylic Glitter Hearts, these things are AMAZING!!! I ordered them not expecting them to be as cool as they are but they’re really thick and just so much cooler than I was expecting them to be. Here’s a close up so you can see just how much dimension there is on the hearts, and the glitter. It’s all fully enclosed in the acrylic so no shedding at all, just a great dimensional embellishment!

For my doodling I just googled doodles and got ideas from there of things to draw. I dotted some of the Puffy Stickers around and just got doodling with a black pen, I think I used a thin Sharpie. I think it makes a page really personal to get your own doodling on there and it was fun to do! I urge you to have a go yourself!

I am sorry I was so late to the party with this collection because a lot of the products are out of stock now and some of the things I’ve used are gone too. It’s a shame and I’m sorry, we do make our blog LO’s up to a month in advance and things were in stock then – cause I ordered them! But I am sorry if you didn’t get your hands on things, I didn’t get a lot of the bits I wanted either and it does suck. I will definitely be looking at new Crate Paper lines in this style with far more interest in the future and probably snapping them up!

There’s not much patterned paper on this LO either. What I usually do when I start with a collection is cut up the cut-apart sheets. I usually make sure I order 2 sheets of any cut-aparts so I can cut one and leave the other whole in case I want to use the reverse side. So I cut up the Collage Paper and I loved both the yellow ‘obsessed’ and the pink ‘think less, live more’ pieces. So I started with them and the photo of my ‘long’ sleeved top not reaching my wrist. A problem I’ve had all my life, cold wrists! Womens clothing never reaches my wrists. So I scrapped about it!

I used a lot of the Puffy Stickers on this LO, I accidentally bought 2 packets of them…. I can’t be the only one who accidentally orders 2 of things lol! I added the little donuts on here as a nod to the summer challenges I was doing as I talked about donuts a lot! I love the pink Chill Foam Alphabet Thickers in this collection so I used them, as well as some older stickers from my collection too. I also used the ‘nope’ from the Puffy Phrase & Icon Thickers and then typed my journalling on the laptop and printed it out on white cardstock which I cut into strips. I also used some of the 12×12 Chipboard Stickers on this LO and they’re unfortunately sold out now. The ladies head and grow glow pieces are from there.

My next LO, I don’t even know where this idea came from but I decided I wanted to cut a rainbow from patterned papers. So I did! I hand drew my own rainbow on some vellum and then I used it to cut my separate papers. I went for a bit of a boho look, I didn’t even try and make it perfect cause I knew it wouldn’t work so going for the shabby chic look, I couldn’t mess it up!

I used the Hustle paper as my border and then hand doodled a frame of a line and dots. Then to make my rainbow I used both sides of the Rose paper, both sides of Wallflower, then some Peace Out, Cute Stuff and Collage papers. I also used some of those papers to layer behind my photo as well.

I definitely wanted to used the Chill Foam Alphabet Thickers for my title so I did the word rainbow with them and added some of the little emphasis lines included in the set around it. For the rest of my title I used the Joyful Day, Mini Puffy Alphabet Stickers from Pinkfresh Studio and the colours went really well with All Heart.

I love those emphasis lines in the alphabet so I decided to add some around the rainbow sticker too. I ended up cutting up some of the lesser used letters on my sheets for these, I cut up 2 Z’s and a couple of X’s to make them all! I have used a few of the thick chipboard stickers from the 12×12 sheet which is out of stock now and some of the Phrase & Icon Puffy Stickers too, the ‘radiate positivity’ and the cool peace fingers. I love those peace fingers in the collection, I could use them over and over again!

My last LO was a real quick and easy one, I wanted to showcase those amazing Acrylic Glitter Hearts and ended up using 3 on here! My squares are from the Selfie Paper, I had cut that up for another LO which I’ll show you on the 16th September. I was playing around with some on a page and decided to just throw them on. I matted them with black cardstock cause it really made them all pop and I popped my photo on top of a piece from the Collage Paper. All I added was some of the 12×1 Chipboard Stickers and a couple of small Puffy Stickers. The finishing touch was a swirly line of Nuvo Crystal Drops. I had tried this last month on one of my LO’s and it didn’t go so well so this time, I drew my line first in pencil and then I went over the line with an embossing tool. I erased the pencil so it just left the embossed line, which is pretty hard to see. But it was good enough for me to follow with my dots and definitely helped my swirl work better this time!

I can’t wait to share the other 4 layouts I made with All Heart on the 16th. I loved what I made with this collection, I found it really easy to use and the LO’s flowed so easily. I was pleasantly surprised. Have a great September Magpies and I’ll see you again on the 16th with more All Heart!