Truly Grateful! | Philippa McCray

Hi there Magpies!

This month I’m working with Paige Evans’ gorgeous new collection for Pink Paislee, Truly Grateful. I love Paige’s collections and am a long time fan of her work. The collection does have an autumn feel, but the gorgeous reds, greens, golds, purples and blues can work for any season. I particularly love the little creatures, flowers, leaves, toadstools and sentiments.

5 A Day!

At the start of this year we took on half an allotment with a friend and despite spells of awful weather we’re really pleased with the crops we’ve produced so far! There’s nothing nicer than being able to pick a variety of fresh veg and flowers.

I started by putting a light watercolour wash diagonally across the page starting with shades of green, through purple and pink, into red and orange and finishing with blue! I added some splatters in the same shades then spent quite a while fussy cutting the little leaves and acorns from Paper 10 sorting them into colour groups.

I knew I wanted to have them cascading across the page. I chose some additional pieces from the Die Cut Ephemera pack, the tag This is the good stuff is a perfect accompaniment for the photo of Rach and Keith lifting potatoes! I used some string and natural raffia along with a small piece of hessian as I felt they complimented the theme of my layout, I was thrilled to find the little trowel in my stash!

The fresh sticker (above) and together (below) are from the 6×12 cardstock stickers. I love the bird and tiny toadstools. The puffy dots and rabbit I included are from the Puffy shape stickers . I don’t think my husband thinks much of the rabbits, they cause havoc on the allotment!!

I mounted my photos on coloured cardstock and some torn strips of Kraft card from my stash. Finally I added a drawn border using different colours of fine tipped pens to compliment the colours in the layout.

Together

For my second layout I used Paper 7 and Paper 9 I gutted Paper 7 (putting aside the frame to use as a mount for my layout) and cut 4 3×3 inch squares one from each of the four colour blocks on the reverse (I only ended up using three of them), I also fussy cut a few of the trees. I cut four of the blocks from Paper 9 and carefully removed the small squares from the centre of each block. I do like grid layouts!

I used watercolour to paint four blocks of co-ordinating colour and added some splatters.

The small square removed from the centre of the main block was used to make a shaker pocket embellished with a puffy heart and tiny bird. The flowers are from the Die cut ephemera pack as well as some fussy cut from Paper 2 I machine stitched around the four main blocks using copper metallic thread before assembling and embellishing.

The sentiment, together, is perfect for the photo of myself and my family taken in July whilst on holiday in Tuscany. I don’t know when the four of us will be together again, I suspect it could be some years as my youngest daughter lives in Australia!

The heart motif is included in the Die cut ephemera pack and is circular with pre cut holes. Initially I used six strands of embroidery thread to cross stitch but unpicked it as I thought it looked too heavy! I stitched it again using three strands and cut the circle into a heart shape.

I’ll be back later this month with more projects using this beautiful collection. Do check it out here and don’t forget to post photos of your creations on the HLM Facebook Group, we love seeing them!

Thanks for stopping by!