All About Girls Week! + Sugar, Spice, and Everything Nice by Jill Sprott

It has been our most "ladylike" week ever at the Crate Paper blog. We brought you an array of darling layouts and a bow tied mini album sprinkled with sweetness throughout. Today CP Gal, Jill Sprott, sets forth to express her take on the new collection, Oh Darling, with two prim and proper layouts covering multiple girly milestones and Jill's most coveted subject, journaling!

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Sugar, spice, and everything nice –– as the mother to a daughter, I can attest that girls are made out of much more than this. For every lovely quality that they possess, there is often a mischievous one to counter it, and for every pink frilly dress that they might be expected to wear, there is often an equal and opposite force prompting them to reach for jeans and t-shirts instead.

In this respect, Crate Paper's "Oh Darling" collection does right by the modern girl, in that it mixes sweet and soft elements with playful and bold ones.

This layout features my two girls – one slightly more furry than the other – and focuses on their cross-species sisterhood. The foundation of the layout is a series of six journaling cards from the "Oh Darling" collection.

As a believer in the design rule, "What you do to one side, do to the other," I sought a sense of balance on the page by placing the large photo on the bottom right opposite to the bold red die-cut heart card at the top left. Before adding the heart card, I machine-stitched vertical and horizontal rows on the background so that a bit of pattern and texture would peek through the negative space. The yellow thread also tempers the impact of the red, and picks up the colors found in the woodgrain pattern at the bottom right.

I added journaling in two areas of the layout, and just as I did with the photo and the heart card, I placed the journaling blocks opposite each other. The handwritten journaling block captures a more emotional, reflective sentiment, while the typewritten journaling block was just plain fun to compose. Including both approaches on the page is fitting, bringing together sweet and silly, much like the photo does.

The blocks in the center of the page overlap somewhat, Helping to unify the layout by blurring the line that divides the two halves of it.

I gathered together a cluster of satin bows from the "Oh Darling" ribbon garland, mixing brights and neutrals to accompany the colors of the layout. In fact, the role of the neutral colors on the layout should not be overlooked; they serve as buffers for the bolder colors.

Although the "Oh Darling" collection contains its fair share of pinks, it also includes a variety of other colors that are equally at home on a girly-girl layout.

This layout acknowledges a milestone in any typical teenage girl's existence: the prom dress fitting. Of course, like any typical teenage girl, my daughter was game for exactly one photo (shared here), but that patronizing smile soon transformed into a grimace and then a pout as I tried to take a few more shots. Nevertheless, the elusive teen girl smile was caught on camera, and thus, it had to be documented here. The more I looked at this photo, however, the more I saw beyond the moment itself to the meaning of the moment. She was a girl in a dress, but she was not just any girl, and this was not just any dress.

I printed the journaling on an "Oh Darling" 3 x 4 journaling card, and included another journaling card with the word "dress" on it and built the title block around it.

So as not to leave the title with the appearance of being disconnnected from the layout, I filled the space above the word "dress" with die-cut accents and gems from the "Oh Darling" ephemera pack as well as dainty heart stickers.

A photo and two journaling cards comprise three quadrants of the design, and the fourth quadrant is a striped frame, which I backed with polka-dotted vellum and to which I added several arrows pointing to the photo above it. It may not be noticeable at first, but the arrows reinforce the color scheme of the layout, which is a slight variation on a primary color scheme. The basic red-yellow-blue scheme becomes a pink-yellow-aqua scheme here.

The finishing touch on this page is definitely a girly one. I trimmed a length of "Oh Darling" ribbon garland, working in bows that pick up the colors on the layout as well as in my daughter's dress.

These two layouts make clear that "Oh Darling" is right at home on any page about any girl, whether she is wearing ballet flats or sneakers, whether she is sporting a tiara or a baseball cap, or, in the case of my girls, whether she is smiling prettily or barking at the mail truck.

Comments

[Laura Turcotte]

what beautiful pages!!

[Anita B]

Fabulous pages, lovin the touches of gold..xx

[Valerie.H]

Love Jill's unique style and hand writing journaling.

[Stephanie Bryan]

You always amazing me with the thought and passion that goes into your pages! Gorgeous!!

[Danielle]

Love!

[Gia Lau]

The details on these layouts are unbelievable! And I wish I had your handwriting! I think the second layout is especially cool- girly without much pink! Love it! (Exclamation point overload-sorry)

[wida]

How did you get the stitching so perfect?! gorgeous handwriting and layout