Sweet Tiny Butterfly | CSI Case File No. 432

I made this layout for CSI: Color, Stories, Inspiration's first April scrapbooking challenge. I have to say I was a little nervous about the red with the pastel colors (see Case File below), but I decided to embrace the red, and I really love how this turned out!

Here are the Case File and Clues. I usually choose the images, but this time, I invited my design team to select the images. Cassie chose this image and I made the clues, so it was my fault, LOL, that the red was a part of the palette, but like I said, I'm happy for the red!

I used the basic color scheme and most of the Evidence clues (my favorite part--I always like to try to get them all on my page. So fun going through my stash!): solid background, polka dots, spring-themed items, flowers, butterflies, strawberries, ribbon, bows, bicycle, sprinkle something, watercolor, metal, and circles.

Here are some details. I looked through my photos for some spring pictures that would go with the palette and came up with these three sweet pictures. I sometimes find multi-photo layouts a challenge in terms of composing the design. I decided three horizontal strips would be the way to go. I searched my paper collections for the colors and nothing really had all the colors, but the New Day collection from Echo Park had pink, green, and yellow, and I decided I could draw from another collection for the aqua.

I tore strips of paper (polka dots were one of the clues) to spread across the page in three sections on a solid white background (another clue). The layout was already looking crowded and I had to think of where to put the title. I settled on making a 3-word title that I could spread down the page.

Once I had the papers in place, I was still left with what to do with red. I couldn't quite find a good red paper to match, so that's when I thought of using a film-strip die in red. Once I made that decision, I could start adhering things and looking for embellishments. If you look closely, you can see I used the packaging technique with some pink watercolor (a clue). I did some stamping in the background for the circles clue with the Bramble Fox Doodles stamp and sprinkled (another clue) some pink splatters. I found a bicycle and some flowers on the Echo Park sticker sheet, two more clues. I added some ribbon (another clue) that had green and aqua from the colors. I added a bow to the basket on the bike (two more clus). The Bramble Fox heart wasn't a clue, but I always add hearts to the pages I give away, and it added more red. Metal was a clue, so I added some silver brads to the bike tires.

Butterflies were a clue, so I added a butterfly charm to this jar of flowers and punched some butterflies and added some metal dots to their centers. Strawberries or other fruit was a clue and I thought maybe that would be a stupid addition to my page, but I thought, what the heck, let me fussy-cut some from a paper in my stash and see how they look, and I really like how they look on my page--a perfect bit of whimsy.

Here's one last close-up. These plastic letters are from Heidi Swapp and the packaging says they're from 2005! That's almost 20 years they've been in my stashing waiting for me to make this layout. See, this is why I never purge!

If you've read this far, I hope you'll come play with us at CSI and would you please jot a note in the comments that you've read this post? Just curious to see if scrappers are still reading blogs... I feel like blogs are sort of the old-school version of process videos. I'd love to create videos, but this page literally took me all day to make!