You Rock - scrapbooking a milestone with Cocoa Vanilla Studio

Hey everyone, I'm here with you today sharing my latest layout using the new and amazing ‘You Rock’ collection. Of course I am taking full advantage of this masculine collection to get more layouts of my little man and his many stories complete. Have I said how much I love this collection yet?!? Seriously … in LOVE!

Anyways, for today’s layout my inspiration came from my photo and the story I wanted to tell. Recently my little man has made another big step in his little life and started wearing big boy undies and going to the toilet. No more nappies! So exciting. Each moment like this we reach is entered with a mixture of emotions, excited of course because he finally did it but sad too as he is getting more grown up by the day and I have a little babe no longer. He is certainly a big boy now! Of course I wanted to document this time in his album, and thought this photo would be a great way to tell the story.

The photo was just snapped when he was doing some painting out in my craft room in his top and jocks. He tended to have only his underwear on in the first week just so we could make those quick dashes to the loo. I just love the fact that technology now allows us to capture these small moments in our life quickly and effectively. As scrapbookers I appreciate that we actually print out our photos and tell these stories, I think we are part of a generation that doesn’t print and all the important little photos people take are stores on multiple hard drives and ‘clouds’. This hobby is just so special.

Anyways back to the layout. Here it is:

Here is the process video for how this layout came together:

For the foundation of my layout I have used a cut file I downloaded free from Paper Issues. It looks like multiple ‘targets’ and made me think of Jack hitting the target and scoring a bulls eye so to speak; reaching another milestone. I backed a few of the segments of the cut file with patterned papers in the collection. I worked in my usual visual triangle in terms of design and backed the targets in that fashion also. I love the look of white on white when I use cut files so I wanted to keep the backing of the cut file minimal and just add pops of colour in certain sections. To add further texture I stitched through a few of the straight lines running through the file. I then bent some of those edges inwards to add dimension and shadow.

For the title of the page ‘you rock – you’re awesome’ I used a combination of the wood veneer and one of the amazing rubber charms. The rubber charm sat beautifully on top of the veneer and allowed me to add more detail to the title. I wanted to do some kind of altering to the wood veneer piece and ended up settling on backing the ‘rock’ section with the yellow side of the ‘inline‘ paper. I love the pop of yellow that brings and adore the look of natural veneer on my pages.

I also added some smaller embellishments to the left of the title. I kept the theme of stars within the embellishment clusters.

For the cluster on the top right corner of the page I used a star from the wood veneer pack, a fussy cut star from the Random patterned paper and the enamel shapes. When I add items like veneer to the page I like to repeat it in a couple more sections just to balance it out.

A big part of this layout as I mentioned above was the story that I wanted to tell. To add my journaling I have, like always, used my typewriter and added it in strip form to the page. I added it to the bottom right side – just to balance the heaviness of the title and the top right cluster.