Joy Parade

Happy December magpies, I hope you are having a lovely month so far and enjoying the build up to the holidays. Life is busy in our house with the constant stream of school activities, gift organisation, winter bugs and of course all the normal work and day to day tasks too. I haven’t found as much time as I would’ve liked for crafting in recent weeks, but I did spend a wonderful weekend with great friends and managed a layout or two between laughter and prosecco!
This month I’ve been creating with Fancy Pants Joy Parade which is quite new into the shop and is a super fun collection with lots of great embellishments on offer too. You can find it in the shop here:
 Fancy Pants Joy Parade 
So Much Fun!:

 
These photos are some of my favourite from summer this year. What could be a better childhood summer day activity than nudey sliding in the garden?! We tried this activity first off with swimming costumes on, but it just didn’t work well, so off he stripped and off he slid down the slippery slide. So funny! These photos are the ones that I kept. There were several outtakes that I have deleted because my son wouldn’t thank me for those when he’s older!
I pieced together my background using strips of patterned papers, and then layered my three square photos up along the middle, backing the central one to create definition between the pictures. I then added several tags and die cuts above and below the photos. There were lots of appropriate pieces in the die cut pack, so I put quite a few on rather than just picking one or two, but I added foam dots behind the “so much fun” title to make it stand out.


 
Puppy Love:
My second page features a photo of my daughter during the holidays when staying with my aunt and cousin. They have 4 dogs and Amelia was just smitten by them! She was so gentle and loving, and would’ve happily just played with the dogs all day long. A true animal lover, that’s for sure.

 
I cut cut three pieces of different papers the same size as my photo (4×4″) and then backed all four pieces with other papers from the range. I organised them in a grid formation in the centre of my layout, and began embellishing. I put my photo top left and title bottom right, with journaling in the other two squares. The puffy alphabet stickers from the collection are great, with a lovely glossy finish and enough black outline to really pop from the page without being overbearing. More pieces from the tags and die cuts packets were layered up, along with some of the cork embellishments which I love! These are so lovely, and really add something a bit different to my pages.


I also got the flair badges pack in this collection which has some great designs. I’ve used one on each page here. I really like adding flair to my pages for dimension.
Happy Together: Finally, my third page is another summer photo from our Mediterranean holiday earlier this year. A somewhat rare, but sweet moment when all three of my children were playing nicely together. You have to catch these moments when they happen right?! They love each other of course, but they are definitely at ages where they play differently to each other and get easily frustrated. I’m sure it will pass. Eventually. So for now I try to focus on these kinds of moments instead!

 
I cut cut a long strip of paper for the top of the page. This stripe and the confetti design are my two favourites in this collection. Gorgeous colours and timeless, universal designs. Again I layered up pieces of paper, tags and die cuts behind my photo and in a the bottom of my page also. I feel like I used quite a lot of pieces on this set of pages, yet I have a whole load left which is great. You definitely get a good full pack for your money. I dotted around some puffy stickers – you get words, hearts, crosses, triangles and dots all on one sheet so it’s a great item, and some nuvo drops too.


So thanks for reading about my pages this month, and go check out the Fancy Pants Joy Parade collection in the Hey Little Magpie shop. As always we’d love to see what you make either on our Facebook group, via Instagram, or post a link here. Did you know we now have regular challenges in Facebook too? Come and join in!