A girl and her Cat

Hello Friends! Today I want to share this layout I created. Let me first talk about the photo. I took this photo of my oldest daughter a few months ago. She was sitting on my bed with her very messy and tangled hair clutching our cat ( poor cat). She was reading out aloud to our Kitty, and I thought it was the sweetest thing. So I got the phone out and snapped this cutie! I got one of the cut apart sheets from Carta Bella's very beautiful collection called 'Flora no. 1' a few months ago, and I thought the colours in the collection would go perfectly with the colours in the photo. Her dress is a 'dirty' pink, and the same pink is present in this collection. I unfortunately only had the one cut apart sheet, so I had to work with a plan. I fussy cut some of the florals from the sheet and placed them on the photo on adjacent corners. I also cut out some of the journaling cards and used them for layering. I had to go digging in my stash for a co-ordination paper with florals. You will see those florals behind the photo, I fussy cut them out. I have no idea what collection that floral paper is from, its a very old paper, so I can't even tell you for referencing. However, I can tell you loads about the background. I absolutely love working with Gelato's.

 I was first introduced to Gelato's while watching one of Missy Whidden's many fabulous process videos on Youtube. Please do yourself a favour and go ahead and watch her videos, they are amazing. Okay, back to the background! I used a plain white piece of 12x12 cardstock and primed it with Gesso. After the Gesso dried I went ahead and rubbed the Gelato's directly onto the paper in the shades that I wanted. I applied it liberally! To blend the Gelato's and get that beautiful gradient effect I blended the colours with my fingers and I also used a hard bristle paint brush, (I applied very little water to the brush). The alpha's and accent stickers I used to embellish the page are all from my stash. 

While creating this page I was reminded that you don't always have to work with a complete collection kit, you can pick out one paper and build an entire page theme around the colours in that one paper. Just as I did with this layout, I had one cut apart sheet of the ' Flora no.1' collection and I made a layout. See, you can do it! Go dig in your stash for coordinating colours and themes and slap them all together, you will be amazed! Get creative with your background, don't be afraid to get messy, you can always clean it up after wards!