Joyful – Part 2 | Cocoa Vanilla Studio | Amy Kattenbelt

Hello Crafty Magpies, We are on the final few days of countdown until Christmas Day. So I am here to share a few more festive layouts with you today. I’ve been creating with the Joyful collection from Cocoa Vanilla Studio. Like I did in my last blog post, I’ve used some photos from last years Christmas and Christmas photos from my childhood. Christmas collections are really timeless and work with any Christmas photos, I always make sure to purchase plenty of the collections I love because you can bring them out year after year to scrap with. I love the pastel colours and sweet animals in this collection

Hey Santa

My first layout features two small photos of my dog dressed up with his Christmas coat, complete with a Father Christmas. He gets so much attention when we take him for walks wearing this, making many children smile, and it doesn’t even bother him!

This layout uses the tree patterned paper called ‘Deck The Halls‘ as the main background. I trimmed in down by 0.5cm on each side and backed in onto a festive red cardstock to give the edges a boundry. This helps stop your eye from wandering off the layout and contains the layouts. I stitched around the patterned paper to add some interest and details and to match the sewing I planned to do in the next step!

I had lots of scrap pieces of paper from this collection, so this tree design was perfect to use strips of them all up. I cut them into decreasing lengths, and lightly adhered them onto my background into a tree shape. I then machine stitched through the middle of each one. For the trunk of the tree, first I placed a chipboard banner piece and then a blue square sticker from the sticker sheet. I also encoperated my title into the top part of the Christmas tree design. I used the ‘Hey Santa’ phrase from the gold puffy sticker set. The gold is amazingly shiny and golden, I love them!

I added my photo to either side of the tree design in a way that felt balanced. I added some word stickers to the bottom of them and a holly spring chipboard sticker too. All good trees need a decoratoin at the top, so I layered two fussy cut stars from one of the papers and topped that with a fabric puffy star from the collection. Next I added lots of the wooden epoxy buttons to look like baubles on the tree. Two chicpboard presents were placed in each bottom corner for extra detail. Lastly I added a splatter of gold ink.

Holly Jolly Christmas Joy

When I saw the cute rabbits in this collection I knew just the photos I needed to use them with. They are from my childhood! I created the layout in a similar way to the first layout, but used two pieces of patterned paper in contrasting paper and used white cardstock for the border. Again I added stitching for texture.

I fussy cut a load of the stars from the patterned paper called ‘Making Spirits Bright’, and layered them together than placed them in a horizontal line where my two background papers met. I nestled my two photos, overlapping, amongst them.

I created my title from the ‘Holly Jolly’ ephemera pieces and the gold chipboard ‘Christmas Joy’ phrase. I had fun adding other ephemera pieces such as the pretty Christmas tree and a sprinkling of different stars. I printed my journalling onto white card and cut it into stripes to place below my photos. It was important that I added some journalling to record the story and memories behind the photo. I placed all the Rabbits so that they were prominent on the page.

Lastly, as with my first layout, I finished with a splattering of gold ink.

I hope you like my festive layouts. If you have been inspired to do some Christmas crafting we would love to see them over on the Hey Little Magpie Chat Facebook Group. I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, Take Care and Stay Safe,