Carta Bella Happy Christmas - I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas

This is first layout using Carta Bella's Happy Christmas collection. This is a traditional Christmas coloured collection and includes images of Christmas trees, poinsettias, wreaths, snowflakes and lots more. It is perfect for scrapbooking Christmas memories and for my layout today I choose to scrapbook a Christmas Day photo from my childhood.

I started by trimming a sheet of the Christmas Wreaths paper down to 11.5" x 11.5" and matted the grey B side onto a sheet of white cardstock.

I found a Christmas present cut file in the Silhouette Store and cut this from smooth white cardstock  then backed it with papers from the collection (B side of Popping Poinsettias and Holiday Hollies), some scraps of green cardstock and some silver glitter card. I chose silver to echo the silver Christmas tree in the photo.

My photo was triple matted with red and white cardstock and silver glitter card. I cut a slit in the backed cut file and slotted my 4x6 behind the poinsettia before attaching the photo and cut file to the centre of the layout with 3D foam underneath.

Without the 3D foam the layout would have been very flat but the foam elevates the elements just enough to give a little bit of dimension.

One of the chipboard phrases was stuck to the bottom of the photo.

A couple of tags cut from the Gift Tags paper were places on the present as well as a chipboard circle from the sheet of chipboard phrases.

I die cut some title lettering from more of the paper and glitter card and arranged the title in an arc in the bottom right corner of the layout.

To give somewhere for the date to sit, I twirled some red and white bakers twine around the bottom left corner and used some very old white rub-ons from my stash to add the date.

Finally I scattered some silver sequins here and there to make the layout even more sparkly.