Simple Stories Simple Vintage Weathered Garden – Part One – Amy Kattenbelt

Hello Magpies, Amy here with you today to share how I created this wreath style layout using the beautiful ‘Simple Vintage Weathered Garden‘ collection by Simple Stories. Its a lovely collection full of soft hues of green, blue-grey and yellow, with lots of florals and butterflies. There are plenty of positive affirmation phrases too.

Awesome

I don’t know if anyone saw my Christmas themed wreath layout I created a few months ago (if not you can check it out on this blog post here). I thought I would use a similar technique with this collection. I have lots of tips over on that blog post that would also apply to this layout too. I thought that all the floral ephemera pieces lend them self really well to a wreath and that is why I decided to go with this design.

I started off by creating my mixed media background. I used a paper from the basics paper pack, which are 12×12 papers with a near solid colour that matches the collection. I went with the paper called Magnolia, that is almost white in colour. However they also have some cool distress areas and faint patterns (lines and text) to add extra details, they are really great for backgrounds. I also used the circle guide from We R Memory Keepers, I drew a very faint pencil circle in the centre of the layout. Then I picked some Distress Oxide colours that I felt matched the collection well. The colours I have used are Speckled Egg, Bundled Sage, Iced Spruce and Antique Linen. I inked some of each of the 4 colours onto my glass work mat (by simply turning the ink pad upside and pressing it to the glass). I then used these 4 inks and some clean water to paint my background to the wreath. I followed the circular shape, varying the colours as I went. I also added lots of splatters too.

When the ink was completely dry, I used two more Distress Oxides ( Pumice Stone and Hickory Smoke) to stamp some small areas using an old script stamp. If you use an acrylic stamp without a solid stamping block you can control which areas of the stamp make contact with the paper and so you can achieve a very random look with no harsh straight lines. Then, with a white paint marker, I drew over the circle shape to really highlight the circular design.

The last layer of my mixed media was using Vicki Boutin’s Iridescent Glaze in small areas through a small patterned stencil that is available from Vicki Boutin’s Fernwood collection. Once my background was all dry I started work on the foliage and florals to create the wreath itself. I used some dies to cut several of the papers from the 6×8 paper pad into branch and leaf shapes. I selected lots pieces from the Floral Bits & Pieces ephemera pack. I layered all these up around the wreath shape. I used some foam pads under some of the die cut leaves to make them more dimensional. I also added 3 of the butterfly die cuts around the wreath, again using foam pads under the wing tips, but wet glue along the body, to give them a 3D effect.

I printed my photo in a small square and layered it on top of two more of the patterned papers from the 6×8 paper pad. I added one of the framed stickers from the Sticker book, and my title is from the foam sticker pack. There are a lot of brilliant titles in that pack and I cant wait to use more of them on other layouts!

I added some round postal mark style stickers to the wreath to fill in some places I thought looked a bit empty. Next I added some of the foam hearts to my layout. Lastly I added some of the washi tape from the collection to my layout. I added some of the word and butterfly tapes to my wreath. To finish off the layout I tore up some of the dark coloured floral tape and added pieces to a few places around the edge of my layout, I absolutely love how this ended up looking. The layout was finished with a splattering of watered down white acrylic paint.

Thank you for coming to take a closer look at how I created my layout. I will be back in a few weeks to share another mixed media layout using the same collection.
Until then, Take Care and Stay Safe,