CP Simply Pale: Pastel Perfection - Stephanie Buice

There is something remarkably beautiful and ever-so-subtle about muted colors that this month, we're focusing our attention on them. With the influx of watercolor, lighter tones and sheer white backdrops, pale colors are finding room to shine now more than ever. Crate Paper has always striven to incorporate pastels into its collections, including Open Road. This month, we're celebrating the artistic quality of pale hues and their exquisite softness. To help us get started is CP Gal, Stephanie Buice.

.......

One of my favorite color groups are the pastels. I like to decorate and dress in them and they are my favorites to scrapbook with. I love their softness and the feeling of freshness they invoke. They are easy on the eyes and can be used for both feminine and masculine pages. Here are two I have to share with you today:

I started both of my layouts with white backgrounds, and wanted to keep the look clean and simple. I really like the soft feel that vellum lends to a page. I dug out all the vellum hearts I had left from the vellum shapes pack and started at the bottom of the page and worked them up. I feel like you could also use butterflies or balloons in their place, but because this layout is about the love I have for my little family, I stuck with the hearts.

I wanted to the hearts to look like they were fluttering about like pouring out of something, so I started placing them in a narrow like fashion and then worked them outward. Vellum can be a very tricky thing to lay down and stay put because adhesive often shows through it. To solve this problem, I decided I would sew through most of the bigger hearts and then used the lightest adhesive I had on hand for the others. Vellum isn't very heavy like many other embellishments, so they will stay put even with very little adhesive.

This picture of my husband and son was taken last Father's Day. We went to lunch after church and right outside the restaurant was the prettiest fountain with tons of flowers. The colors were all a little too bright for my page, and so to keep the tones light and pale, I decided that it would be best to convert the image to black and white. This not only helped to keep the feel of my layout soft, but also helped me to make the pastels an option for this masculine page.

I wanted the page to be simple and clean. I didn't want the eye to stop at the picture, so I kept the journaling tiny and to the point. I printed it out and cut it up into little pieces to maintain the floating aura of the page.

For my next layout, you will notice that I kept it white and crisp, but chose to add a bit more color. It's still pale, though not to the extreme at which the other layout is.

In accordance with Spring, and since the birth of our son, we buy a brand new box of sidewalk chalk as soon as the weather starts to warm up. I usually put it in his Easter basket - it's a fun treat! Almost every morning, after our walk, you can find in the driveway drawing and having a fun time. I love how my son looks forward to it and it's something we do together. He is only two and a half, so it's not like I have years and years of chalk drawing experience. My trucks all look like cars and my cats all kind of resemble dogs, but he doesn't seem to care much about it. All in all, I just wanted to make a layout documenting our little Spring sidewalk tradition.

I again chose to stick with vellum shapes from the Oh Darling collection. I chose to work with an assortment of vellum border pieces and started by layering them in the center of my page. At first, I hadn't planned on leaving much space between them, but when I went to add my journaling beneath my pictures, it looked heavy and that wasn't the look I was going for. So, after playing around a bit, I decided to place the journaling stripes between each of the vellum pieces.

Originally, I had two pictures on the layout - one black & white and the other, full color. In the end, I wasn't happy with the combination. I decided to place a Oh Darling frame on top the b/w photo, but it still didn't meet my expectations, though I loved the frame! So, I looked through the remaining shapes I had left and decided on a tiny pink heart that says "Lovely" to put inside the frame. I felt like the pink heart was the perfect touch and kept the eye moving from bottom to top.

To finish off the layout, I added a final pink vellum strip above the picture and frame. It creates a unified design. I sewed down the center of my shapes to hold them in place. I didn't mind that they weren't perfectly straight since it added another element of fun to the page.

I hope that after seeing my layouts, you are tempted to take a lighter approach to your color choices and test them out on some fun, and even masculine pages. Thanks for stopping by today!