Today’s tuto­r­ial, is about adding paint and stitch­ing to your layouts.

I posted this lay­out  a cou­ple of days ago (click for more ), and here are some pho­tos explain­ing how it all came together.

Inspi­ra­tion for this lay­out, came from here, (pinned here). I loved the yellow!

As soon as I placed the photo on the yel­low pat­terned paper, I could see that pinks and pur­ples popped off the page. I liked that

First, I started by print­ing my photo, it was sup­posed to be a 8 by 10 photo and fit the page entirely, but this was the first time I tried print­ing at home, and for some rea­son a part of the photo was not true to color. Rather than reprint it, I just chopped the photo, and decided to add a col­lage like design at the bot­tom of the lay­out. (which turned out to be the best idea ever!)

I loved the pieced flower in the inspi­ra­tion pho­tos, so I quickly sketched one onto the yel­low paper. I also chose a glas­sine bag, and some strips of paper for the layout.

Now I added the paint strokes. I know many of you arent really com­fort­able adding paint, I totally under­stand that. For the life of me, I can­not mist my lay­outs. It never looks good, and I end  up wast­ing hours just star­ing at my lay­outs, and telling myself it looks hor­ri­ble. But paint, I am very com­fort­able with. And I can give you a few point­ers here.

I gen­er­ally use paint to areas I want to define, add a shadow or high­light. Dip your brush in paint, and imme­di­ately wipe your brush almost clean. The brush will still have a lit­tle paint in it, but will be almost dry, and that will give beau­ti­ful depth to your brush strokes. Add lit­tle first, and it will dry in a minute, and then another layer on top. This way, you wont get a dark harsh color.

The stitch­ing on this lay­out was all ran­dom lines, some zig zags some not. I used my sewing machine, because I love it!

For the flower, I used two papers– the yel­low one and also the pack­ag­ing cream tissue-like paper that came in my Stu­dio Cal­ico box…

Adhere petals, to form a flower (I used a craft glue stick, archival safe one, instead of a tape runner)

Add title.

For the title, I wrote the word “lit­tle” mul­ti­ple times on a waste piece of paper, till I had the right size. I then held it over the photo and pierced holes through both the lay­ers. Makes it so much eas­ier to stitch! I also added a straight line of stitch­ing under the sticker alphas…

And just for you, I scanned my hand writ­ten “lit­tle” word, along with the paper pierc­ing so you can down­load and print it and use it on a lay­otu of your own if you wish. You could use to make titles “lit­tle girl” “lit­tle boy” “lit­tle bun­dle of joy” “lit­tle joy” etc.

Down­load here

 Last step was to print my jour­nal­ing and cut it into strips and adhere into place. Add some punched shapes and its done