it's five o'clock somewhere

A while back, the Cocoa Daisy team invited me to design for them using their April kit and I, of course, jumped at the chance. {You can see my Guest Designer's Gallery here.} I've never subscribed to a kit club before, but I have to say that it sure was nice to have a pizza box full of goodies arrive on my doorstep. All the goodies coordinated and complemented each other well and included so many yummy embellishments.

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When I saw that pineapple patterned cardstock, I knew for sure that I was going to include it in a layout AND I knew exactly the photo I was going to use! So what if the photo is years old, I still love the colors and the jumble of toys in the background. Plus, it doesn’t hurt that it makes me remember the days when my babies were still babies and a day at Nana’s pool meant that Mommy was in the pool the whole day, too. No rest for me, and a icy, fruity drink at the end of the day was a really, really good idea!

I consider myself a simple scrapper, nothing too fancy. And most often, not anything that includes techniques. One thing I do love is layering my embellishments. Oh, and lots and lots of clustering bursts. Sometimes, I just stand there and start piling on the bits and baubles laying in front of me to see if they work.  In this corner, I first did the machine stitching, leaving the threads attached, to anchor the pineapple paper, the orange tag and the strip of paper leftover from when I trimmed my cardstock. And then the clustering began…I added the yellow Dotties to a paperclip and die cut and much later added the green and blue twine because it balanced the blue and green from the toy buckets that in my layout photo.

Using my circle punch, I chose a journaling-like pattern from the circle patterned paper and used it to highlight the word paradise from the pack of Ephemera. I layered the pineapple to rest on top of the Five o’Clock embellishment and added another Dottie. And see how I kept the contrasting strip of patterned paper when I trimmed my cardstock? That’s what I used to make the pennant shape I stitched on top of the orange tag at the top left of the page. I snuck in a bit of journaling along the right side of the page, which is kind of fun when you don’t have a long story to document.

I love how I can play with color, pattern and texture and really let loose while scrapbooking doing things I wouldn’t “do” in real life. You know, like having wonky lines and loose sewing threads and polka dots on top of polka dots and slightly off color combinations. But, I love it when it all comes together and my most colorful pages always turn out to be my favorite pages.