Summer Smile | Paper Issues Take 5 Challenge

I love challenges that challenge me to use certain things on my layout because it gets me digging through my stash and I'll often use things I wouldn't have thought of using. Paper Issues has a challenge every month called Take 5, where they give you a list of about a dozen items and ask you to choose 5. I always try to use as many as possible. I took 10 from the list this month to create this layout for my friend:

Here's the Take 5 list. I used cardstock, aqua, a sun, stripes, the word fun, numbers, stamps, enamel dots, brads, and stickers.

Here are some details. Isn't that sun cut file awesome? It's totally FREE from Paper Issues, called Sun & Fun. Once I decided on my colors, I went to my paper scraps and found some papers to layer behind the photos and then I opened my box of diecuts that are organized by color and just dug through there to see what I could find. That bright pink tab is ancient--it's an old Ki Memories die cut that was just a plain square with rounded edges, and I just tucked it behind the layers to make it a tab and stamped on it. The "best ever" is also a stamp. Stamps were one of the items in the list to use, as were enamel dots, sun, the color aqua, numbers (the date) and the word fun.

The sunglasses were also a stamp. That pool water paper is super old. It's an old Paper Pizazz paper! I added a scrap of striped paper, which was also on the list, as were brads.

And finally, I used letter stickers and phrase stickers for the stickers in the list. Oh, and that awesome "Summer" word is also from a free Paper Issues cut file called "Summer Days."

While you're over at Paper Issues checking out the hundreds of free cut files, be sure to check out all the latest and greatest new stuff in the store. Please use my code, Debbi (no e on the end), and you'll get 20% off your entire purchase!

I hope you'll play along with this or one of the tons of other challenges. Post your creation in the Facebook Group, and you might win a gift card to the shop!