Mintay Papers Wildwood Secrets - Embrace Nature

I have recently been playing with Mintay's new Wildwood Secrets collection – it's beautiful!

If you're like me and love countryside walks, this collection is made for you. It's spot-on for scrapbooking all your outdoor adventures, nature strolls, and woodland memories. The collection's theme is the forest/woods, with a gorgeous, warm, and organic colour palette. Think mossy greens, soft browns, natural tones, and a vibrant pop of red. Plus, it's filled with beautiful images of woodland creatures, wild strawberries, mushrooms, and other forest details.

To start this layout, I took a sheet of smooth white cardstock. Then, I used a mini brayer to spread some green acrylic paint right in the middle.

Using a brayer with a good, thick paint creates wonderful texture, which I just love for adding dimension to my backgrounds.

When the green paint was dry, I also splatted some white paint on top.

I wanted to frame my layout with a wide green border. Usually, I'd just trim my white cardstock down and mount it on a larger piece of green card. But this time, I gutted a 12x12 sheet of green cardstock to create a 1-inch frame. This let me position the frame directly on top of my white cardstock, giving me the flexibility to perfectly centre it around the painted area before I committed to sticking it down.

Next, I took my 5x3.5 inch photo and matted it with a piece of patterned paper #5, leaving just a narrow border. As paper #5 is red this helps the photo really stand out. Then, I placed the matted photo onto my layout, overlapping a piece of green patterned paper from the 6x8 add-on paper pad.

Next, I turned to the paper die-cuts pack to add some embellishments. I arranged these in clusters, placing one on each of two corners of my photo. My choices weren't random – I specifically picked wild strawberry die-cuts to pick up on the red paper I used to mat the photo.



Alongside these, I added images of a deer, a bird, and a ladybird on a log. These elements highlight the woodland theme of both my photograph and the overall design.

I added a delicate dragonfly die-cut near the top of the layout and to add more texture, I used my sewing machine and white thread to straight stitch around the edge of the white cardstock.

I created the title "Embrace Nature" by placing green mini alphabet stickers from my stash (for "Embrace") above the word "Nature" from the 6x12 sticker sheet.



I also added a couple of word strips from the sticker sheet near the bottom of the layout.



I printed the date and place onto white cardstock and placed it near the bottom of the layout.



Finally to give the layout a bit of sparkle I scattered some green and cream sequins here and there.

Photoplay This Happy Life - Loving This

This is my final layout featuring the This Happy Life collection from Photoplay. This collection is just bursting with brightness and happy colours, making it perfect for creating happy scrapbook pages. My layout today was inspired by a layout by Rebecca Meadows found on Pinterest.



I began the layout by layering a slightly trimmed 12x12 sheet of white cardstock onto a 12x12 sheet of black cardstock.

Next, I cut five long tags, each about 2" x 10", from various papers in the collection: It Happened, This Year, Sweet Hello, Everyday, and All My Life papers. To finish the tags, I made reinforcing rings from black cardstock and added them to the holes of each tag.



I make hole reinforcers for my tags by using a tiny round punch and a larger round punch. First, I use the tiny punch to punch a small circle from cardstock, and then I use the larger punch to punch out the hole, forming the reinforcer.

After attaching the reinforcers, I arranged the tags vertically across the layout and threaded black and white baker's twine through their holes.

I also incorporated a black cardstock tag onto the strung tags, using it as a mat for my 6x4 photo. For this one, I created a hole reinforcer from a piece of the patterned paper.



To secure the twine and give it some extra texture, I used metal staples.



In my stash, I found a black puffy phrase sticker that was the perfect title, and I placed it towards the bottom of the layout, slightly overlapping the photo.

To embellish the layout, I fussy cut flowers from the This Year paper. These were then arranged into clusters on both the photo tag and in the bottom right corner of the page.



I typed my journaling on the computer and printed the strips onto white cardstock. These strips were then placed next to the photo on the layout, with their right sides nestled into the fussy cut flowers, creating a natural flow.



Finally, I used a black fine liner pen to outline the white cardstock and the patterned paper tags. To complete the layout, I added a few pink enamel dots to the flower clusters.