Care Free – Heidi Swapp – Part 1 | Amy Kattenbelt

Good Morning Magpies. It’s Amy here today, and I am sharing a few layouts using the lovely new collection by Heidi Swapp called ‘Care Free‘. Sometimes a paper comes along that just catches your attention, and gets your creativity flowing. That was the case for the paper called ‘Salty Air‘. As soon as I saw it, I knew I would need to purchase several sheets, along with the rest of the collection. Over the last year I have been scrapping a lot of coastal photos that I take on our daily dog walks. I think thats why I fell in love with this piece of paper so much. As a result my two layouts today are both based on this paper.

Always Low Tide

For this layout I cut a sheet of the Salty Air up into strips of various width. I distressed the edges and stuck them to the bottom of my white cardstock base. They are overlapped, tucking the piece above underneath the next one. I then folded back some of the edges to enhance the wave type effect.

I matted my square photo with two papers from the 6×8 paper pad. The papers I picked were the rich brown patterned paper and the dotty green patterned paper. These colours matched my photo well. I placed these layers on top of piece of 6×8 patterned paper that has a white background and a subtle pattern on the background. This was tucked under the Salty Air paper.

I created my title using the tiled alphabet stamp set that comes with the collection. I stamped my title on to a pale green-blue cardstock with black permanent ink.  Then I used a very thick layer of Glossy Accents to give them a 3D shiny look. You need to leave them for several hours to dry, over night works really well.

I clustered some of the stickers from the sticker sheet in the bottom right corner of the photo and also one to the left of the photo. I also sketched some little elements…a fish, some seagulls and a sail boat, which I then cut out and used to embellish my layout.

After I had done all of this, I felt like the layout was still lacking something. I was brave and really channelled my inner creativity and sketched some cacti to either side of my photo. The inspiration was taken from the cactus sticker. I then used some coloured pencils to add some colour to these sketches, only in the areas that they spilled out onto the plain white cardstock. It was actually such a freeing thing to do and I really love how it looks.

I wrote my journaling on a large sticker and placed in the lower right corner with some little embellishment stickers. Lastly I added some word stickers to the waves just to add a little more interest to the lower half of the layout.

Let Your Dreams Set Sail

The base of this layout uses one sheet of 12×12 Salty Air paper and one piece of the same pattern from the 6×8 paper pad. I also used a sheet of white cardstock and the B side of piece of patterned paper called ‘Outdoorsy‘. First, I cut the beachy sand part of the Salty Air paper off, following the contour of the wave.  These papers were layered up on top of each other.

I’m using a long this photo of my son sailing. The photo was matted in white, then in the rich brown patterned paper (that I used in the first layout) and then in a pale grey patterned paper. I layered some of the tags from the ephemera pack, and some of the larger stickers.

My title was created from the Simple Stories Color Vibe Alphabet Book in Lights colours. The last word ‘Sail’ uses the navy blue Elle’s Studio acetate alphabet. It was at this point I decided I would like to add pops of bright blue into the layout to break up the soft pastel colours of the collection and to co-ordinate with the blue sail of the boat in my photo. To do this, I added extra pops of blue by adding blue and white twine to the tags, and also puffy stars.

I fussy cut some of the leaf pattern from one of the sheets of 6×8 patterned paper in this beautiful blush pink colour. I also used several of the photo corners from the sticker book as decorations, I really love using photo corners in the way, turning them into chevrons. Lastly, I did add two of the photo corners to my photo too!

I hope I have inspired you to take a look at this collection. Maybe when you spot a paper you absolutely love to be brave and get creative with it. Buying a few sheets of it really helps with this. Don’t forget we have lots of fun challenges going on at the moment in our Facebook group to celebrate iNSD, so do pop over and say hi.

I’ll be back later in the month to share some more layouts using this collection. In the meantime Take Care and Stay Safe