American Crafts June Gallery | Hi 5

On June 1st our youngest celebrated his 5th birthday.  I always like to take a photo of each of the kids on their birthday, so we did a little photo shoot.  Let's just say that his idea of taking a good photo and my idea of taking a good photo, are totally different!  So I just snapped away, and then looked through all of the photos later, to see if there was one that I could actually use.  Thankfully, I did get a great shot...even though he wasn't looking directly at the camera.  But the smile was great and he had his hand up to represent age 5, so I went with it!

I wanted to create a happy page for this photo...without a birthday theme.  I'm not overly fond of creating birthday themed pages.  It's just this weird thing I have!  So I knew that the Plus One collection by Amy Tangerine from American Crafts was just what I needed for this page!

 
Like most scrappers, I can't bring myself to throw away the manufacturer strips at the bottom of the patterned paper.  They definitely come in handy, so I always keep them with the collection.  I grabbed the Buddy patterned paper and immediately knew that a diagonal design would be in the works.  I used the manufacturer strips along the diagonal line of the background paper, and added in some Thickers and die cuts, with the manual die set.  I also used the arrow stamp from the Acrylic Stamp set and stamped on a few of the paper strips.  I added my title over my photo, with some clustering on the corner.  And I finished my layout, by fussy cutting the heart shapes and stitching down the center of each one.

So next time you are choosing patterned papers for a project, make sure to save the manufacturer strips!  There are a lot of fun, creative ways you can use them on your paper projects!

Supplies:  Buddy (366812) - Plus One; Addition (366851) - Details; Bits (366849) - Die Cut Cardstock Shapes; Associate (366860) - Dies; Mix Tape (366839) - Washi Tape; Accompany (366856) - Acrylic Stamps; Twins (366837) - Thickers; Collage (366057) - Thickers

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