Uni Life | These Days collection | Mandy Melville

Hello everyone!

Mandy here today for Throwback Thursday! I decided to dig into my stash and create a layout using the beautiful These Days collection. It was perfect for documenting these photos of my eldest daughter on her first day of uni!

I started my layout off with a sheet of the gorgeous Home Grown floral paper. Using a punch, I created a decorative border around the paper and then matted the patterned paper on a sheet of white cardstock. Next I trimmed down a sheet of the orange Wall of Fame paper to 9 inches square and layered that over the floral paper. I then matted my photos using the reverse side of the Home Grown paper and adhered them towards the top of the Wall of Fame patterned paper. So that the photos didn’t look like they were just floating, I gave them a ‘shelf’ to sit on by adding a strip of the woodgrain Pretty Posies paper underneath the photos. I also added a decorative element to this strip by punching a strip of leaves from the green Family Ties paper and adhering that across the woodgrain strip.

Using embellishments from both the Die Cut Ephemera and the Floral Ephemera packs, I created an embellishment cluster to the right of the photos. I tried to be intentional when selecting my embellishments for this page, choosing to use icons such as a typewriter and a stack of books, which tied in nicely with the theme of the layout.

I created another embellishment cluster in the bottom left hand corner of the layout, using more items from the Die Cut Ephemera pack. I chose the mug because my daughter loves to drink tea and often has a cuppa on the go while she’s doing uni work. I also added some typed journalling underneath this embellishment cluster.

To complete the visual triangle, I added a some more embellishing in the top left hand corner. I kept it fairly simple by just adding a banner and a tab as the page was already quite busy. The three embellishment clusters on the layout help to draw the viewer’s eye around the page.

For my title, I decided on using the beautiful Foam Title Stickers. However, as these photos were of a significant day, I didn’t necessarily want a generic title for this layout, so I decided to alter some of the letters to create the specific title that I wanted. The word ‘Life’ was already one of the words from the sticker pack, however to create the word ‘Uni’, I had to get a bit creative. I used the ‘U’ from the word ‘You’; the ‘N’ and the ‘I’ were both altered from other letters in the word ‘Home’. Don’t be afraid to alter embellishments to suit your layout. There’s no rules to say that you have to use them as is!

I hope that you enjoyed taking a look at my layout and maybe you’ve been inspired to create with the These Days collections as well. If you don’t already have this beautiful collection in your stash, you might find some items still available in the Cocoa Vanilla store.

Mandy x