Welcome back today friends, it’s Kel back today to share my final post for 2023…and to share my favourite creation from this year.
Going back through all of my pages, my top 3 pages were all from the Happy Days collection…the colours are just so beautiful ad vibrant but I had to choose just one…. and I think it is this one..
I think it’s the colour palette…yellow always makes a page bright and happy, and mixed with aqua and magenta, it’s a chefs kiss.
I love circles in my designs and the pops of black help highlight the colours…
I hope you have all enjoyed the inspiration the design team and I have provided in 2023 and are looking forward to seeing what 2024 brings!
Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas… stay safe and enjoy the festivities!
Mandy here with my final post for 2023, and today I’ll be sharing a few of my favourite layouts that I created this year! I always find it hard to narrow down, but for this year I think these are the layouts that I most enjoyed creating! Looking back at these, I think what I love most about them (apart from the photos and memory keeping of course!) is that they include fun and different ways to feature patterned papers on my layouts. So, without further ado, here are my top 5 for 2023…
I created this one for the July monthly challenge, and what I love about it is the colour combination, as well as the grid design. Plus I created this just a week before I jetted off to Europe with my daughter, and so it brings back all those feelings of excitement as we counted down the days till our trip! This layout features the Happy Days collection.
Another layout featuring the Happy Days collection, but this time I chose a completely different colour combination . I love the way this layout just makes me feel happy! I had a lot fun creating the grid background and embellishing each square with cute embellishments!
I’m always a fan of pretty florals, and the Heart & Home collection certainly did not disappoint. This layout was amongst my favourites this year for the fussy cut floral clusters that it features, as well as the warm colour palette and the fun diagonal design!
I love love love the bright colours and that gorgeous rainbow on this layout featuring the Happy Days collection! This just goes to show what a versatile collection this is, with this being my third Happy Days layout to make it into my top 5! I had so much fun with the tone-on-tone embellishing and the end result is a bright and fun layout that makes me happy!
And the final layout that I’m sharing today might just be my favourite of them all! It was the first layout that I created with the Heart & Home collection and I absolutely love the colour palette, as well as the design! Plus it features a photo of my four favourite people!
Well, that’s a wrap from me for 2023, and sadly this is also a farewell from me. I’ve made the difficult decision to step down from the design team next year as life just continues to get busier and as a result I need to scale things back a little. I have absolutely loved being a part of this team (for the second time!) and I’m so very grateful to Zoe and Sue for inviting me to join. It has been a pleasure to share my layouts with you all, and I hope that I’ve inspired you along the way!
With that, I wish you all a wonderful and blessed Christmas and New Year!
Hey everyone! This is Niki (@nikiclairecreates) with a new layout and process video. I was determined to make Christmassy layouts in December but I don’t have any Cocoa Vanilla Studio Christmas Collections anymore – I loved them so much that I used them all up at the time! So I’m using the two latest collections, Happy Days and Heart & Home and getting Christmassy with those! For this layout I’ve mostly used Happy Days but the big green stars are from Heart & Home.
I love 3D stars and stars are perfect for Christmas. I also love modern Christmas colours, so pink & turquoise mixed with greens and golds so it was absolutely no problem for me to make a Christmas layout with these colours!
I settled on a horizontal design across the layout but I also added a little pink ink as a base colour and some splatters of the pink and gold paint too. I used several of the specialty paper Gold Frames from the Happy Days collection.
I picked out my papers and then used metal dies to make lots of stars. I then scored them at all five points, and folded them to make the 3D stars. I added flowers and hearts from Happy Days in the same colours.
For my title I used a mixture: ‘wonderful’ and ‘time’ were the chipboard words from Happy Days, ‘the’ and ‘of’ were the gorgeous gold word Ephemera from Heart & Home. The little letters are the puffy mini alphabet stickers from Happy Days.
I love how it turned out and I think it is very Christmassy! You can see the process video below
Hey everyone, this is Niki (@nikiclairecreates) and today I am missing summer so have gone back to using Happy Days! I’ve used photos from my little boy’s 5th birthday this year when we spent the day at a water park having lots of fun.
I started off with the turquoise paper which I cut into a large circle, and I added this to a white background. I mounted my three photos and added them to the circle together with two colourful stripes from A5 paper stack. I also added that gorgeous tassel ephemera from the Die Cut Ephemera.
I then added some floral clusters using a mixture of Floral Ephemera and fussy cut flowers. For my title I used one of the Chipboard Titles and the lovely Mini Puffy Alphabet Stickers. I added some puffy stickers and handwrote my journaling as well as adding some white paint splatters.
I hope you enjoyed this layout, it was fun to go back to summer time, I adore this bright happy collection so much!
Mandy here today to share a new layout featuring the gorgeous Happy Days collection! This collection just makes me happy, with it’s bright colours and pretty florals I just can’t get enough of it! For the layout that I’m sharing today, I chose to document some photos of my hubby and I celebrating our 21st wedding anniversary this month.
I decided for this layout that I wanted to create a grid design so that I could easily incorporate four photos from the day onto the page. To make it a little more interesting I created a frame around the photos using a template that I traced around to create each piece. For my colour palette I chose to stick mainly to the magenta, pink and the dark blue, and so I used the blue Definitive paper and the magenta coloured Flutterby paper to create the frame. I filled the middle of the frame with the sweet pink Lush Blooms paper and added corners inside the frame using an aqua paper from the A5 Paper Stack. I adhered my photos in the middle of the frame using craft foam for added dimension.
To the right of the photos I created an embellishment cluster using a flower from the Floral Ephemera pack, another flower that I fussy cut out of the Lush Blooms paper, as well as a Die Cut flag banner. I chose embellishments that stayed within my chosen colour palette, and I adhered some overlapping the photos and tucked others underneath to create depth and interest within the cluster.
To balance out the cluster on the right, I created another cluster to the left of the photos. I again used Floral Ephemera as well as fussy cut elements to create the cluster. To finish the clusters off I added a Chipboard heart sticker to each.
Finally, I added some typed journaling above the photos and my title below. I used the beautiful Chipboard Titles and decided on the phrase ‘Love You’ as I thought that suited the photos and theme of the layout perfectly.
Thank you so much for joining me here on the blog today! I hope you found some inspiration!
Hello, hello! It’s Anna here and today I don’t have a layout for you! While I was waiting for the brand new “Heart & home” collection to arrive, I once again decided to make “use as much as you can” type of project with the older line. Those cabins won’t stretch any more further so I need to make some room. Truth to be told – I would probably need to make 100 of albums like this to notice some empty space… However, the result of my internal challenge is cute, colorful mini album made with wonderful “Happy days” collection. I need to warn you that I have many photos to share with you.
I made this mini album from scratch, using three pieces of cardboard for the cover and some colorful cardstock for the page bases. I arranged them in rainbow order inspired by all the rainbows in “Happy days” collection. I also went through all the pattern papers and chose few in matching colors to continue the rainbow trend. I used both 12*12 papers like “Lush blooms”, “Flutterby”, Juicy friut”, “Feel good”, “Little blossoms” , “Sunshine lollipops” along with A5 Paper Stack.
Album is quite small, measuring only 10*15 cm, but each page has some folded flaps or pockets so it can hold many photos. You can easily expand the album even further by adding even more flaps on the back of each page.
This is how it looks from the side, with cascade of pages, each 1cm smaller than a previous one. There is plenty of room to add more volume with photos and embellishments.
To decorate the pages, I reached for almost all of the embellishments from this collection. I used Accesory stickers, Die cuts ephemera, Floral ephemera, Chipboard titles, Puffy stickers and Puffy hearts. I only added the glue on the edges of the embellishments so you can still tuck the photo behind it!
I also added some embellishments on the back of each page, the way you can look at it without turning the album upside down. As I mentioned each page has some flap or pocket for more room for photos. It was hard to photograph them so you need to believe me they are there.
Here are all the album pages I created:
And that is all! I know it was a lot of photos but it was hard to choose only few pages to showcase. I hope you like this mini album.
That is all for today! We will see each other in September and I will for sure have a project made with brand new CVS baby! Can’t wait to dive in. Thank you so much for spending your precious time with me.
Hi everyone! This is Niki (@nikiclairecreates) with another layout and video using the Happy Days collection. I decided to make ‘medals’ out of my photos on this layout using those fabulous colourful stripes from the Sunshine Lollipops paper.
I started off by gutting the middle of the Sunshine Lollipops paper, in order to preserve the outer edge: I can use this for a different layout (I have a tendency to be a bit of a thrifty scrapper sometimes!). I then cut apart the stripes from the gutted piece. I chose 7 stripes to use as a main feature on this layout, and I distressed the edges of all of them, folded them in half and also machine stitched down the middle of each one.
I then decided that a white background just wasn’t doing it for me…and went looking for what patterned papers I could use for a background instead. I settled on the B side of the Rainbow Bright paper, I love the white with ditzy hearts and this was perfect to add some interest to my background. I trimmed it down, distressed the edges and added it to a sheet of white to give it a boarder.
I arranged my colourful stripes onto the background together with my large photo which I cut into a circle shape. I cut three more smaller photos into circle shapes too. From the offcuts of the colourful stripes, I created little ribbons to add to the bottom of each photo – making them into ‘medals’ or ‘rosettes’. I also did this with a fussy cut frame from the Specialty Paper.
I added my photos to the layout together with Die Cut Ephemera ‘Amazing’ rosette. I then added small embellishments to each one: Floral Ephemera, Chipboard Phrases, fussy cut words from the Definitive paper, Chipboard Shapes, Puffy Stickers and phrase stickers from the Accessory Stickers.
I finished off with a few splatters of white paint over the colourful stripes and also handwrote in a few lines of journaling. If you would like to watch how this layout came together, you can watch my process video below! I hope you enjoy it.
Thank you so very much for joining me today, I am really pleased with how this layout turned out!
Hi everyone! This is Niki (@nikiclairecreates) and I’m so happy to be back with another layout and process video using Happy Days. After my Guest Designs over the past two months, I was delighted to be invited to join the team on a permanent basis! Thank you so much to Zoe & Cocoa Vanilla Studio for having me!
For today’s layout I decided to use THAT rainbow paper – you know the one, it’s called Rainbow Bright and has a big beautiful rainbow on it!
I cut all the arcs apart, distressed the edges of all, then stuck them back together, overlapping a little, onto a piece of white card. They overlapped the right edge of the cardstock background quite a bit so I just chopped off the excess. I then added machine stitching around each of the arcs.
I added my photo to the left side of the page. I wanted to mount it on yellow paper but didn’t have any left! So I used a piece of the A5 Paper Stack that I had a small piece of and just about managed to mount two sides of the photo!
I added some clusters to the top and bottom of the layout. I included two fussy cut clouds, that I had leftover from when I made a mini album. I also added Die Cut Ephemera, and Floral Ephemera to these clusters and Accessory Stickers too.
For my title I used ‘super’ fussy cut from the Definitive paper and the word Awesome from the Chipboard Phrases. I also added a sub-title ‘best ever’ also fussy cut from the Definitive paper.
I finished off by handwriting my journaling around the yellow arc, and adding a few chipboard hearts and puffy hearts to the layout! I have created a process video for this layout, which can be watched below, I hope you enjoy it.
I absolutely love how this one turned out and I hope you do too! Thanks so much for joining me today and happy scrapping!
It’s Sophie on the blog today with a new layout to share!
I used the Happy Days collection for this page. I had a photo of my daughter on the lake and had the idea to cut a few wave shaped borders out of patterned papers and arranged them at the bottom of a 11×11 inches white frame to create movement and fun waves.
I placed the frame on a 12×12 white cardstock.
I mounted my photo on tissue paper and adhesive foam, and embellished around it with beautiful flowers from the Happy Days Floral Ephemera pack.
I used the Happy Days Chipboard Titles for my title and added a subtitle cut out of a patterned paper.
I handwrote my journaling directly on the white cardstock, added a few embellishments at the top of the photo and stamped the date.
Here are more close-ups:
It’s very simple and different. I really like the result! I hope you like it too!
Thank you for stopping by, you will find a Reel of my process on the @cocoavanillastudio Instagram account and on mine @so_scrappy
Welcome back to the Cocoa Vanilla blog everyone, it’s Kel here today to share my next layout using the Happy Days collection.
I decided I wanted to limit my colour choices to the magenta, yellow and aqua colours in the collection and this is what I came up with… I just LOVE this colour palette..
To start my page, I traced some circles in different sizes onto my background using a black permanent marker, then coloured them in using some watercolour. Next, I added some stamping in circular shapes in corresponding colours to help fill in my background.
To keep with the circular elements of my background, I cut my photo into a circle and backed it onto another circle using the Feel Goodpaper. I also cut some circles out of the Feel Good, Little Blossom and Flutterby papers to help fill out the background.
Next, I worked on my title. I used the ‘Hello’ banner flag from the Ephemera pack and some of the Chipboard Title Stickers.The word ‘girl’ didnt come as a word in the pack so I just made my own word with the letters on offer.
Next came the fun part of embellishing! On the right side of my photo I used the two pinwheels from the Ephemera Pack and also the sun which I layered under the ‘Hello’ flag.
To the left of my photo I used some of the florals that I cut from the ‘Lush Blooms’paper. I also used some of the tiny florals that I cut from the A5 Paper Stackto scatter across my page. I also created a small cluster of the florals to the right side of my page.
I love the phrase stickers found on the Accessory Sticker Sheet and I used some of them under my photo and on the right side of my page.
I still felt my page need more so I used some of the butterflies from the Ephemera packand some which I cut from the Flutterby paper..one next to my florals on the left, and a few ‘flying’ up the right side. I love to use dimensional foam under these to help them pop off the page.
Lastly, I used some of the Puffy Stickers to finish off any gaps, and stamped some black hearts to co-ordinate with my black and white photo and the black in the title…this helps make the colours on the page stand out.
Thanks for stopping by today and you feel inspired.