Happy Times – Frilly Flower Head Cut File

Hello my hearts, welcome to a new week! I hope you are enjoying the sunshine, or are at least, not hugely bothered by it. As a red headed woman of a certain age, I’m definitely not someone who loves heat or too much direct sunlight! We finally managed a quick visit to the beach this weekend and as us scrappers do, I marvelled at how things had changed over the years of us visiting the seafront, for example, since this photo was taken.

This layout uses our “frilly Flower Head” cut file (pre-cut here) and will (when I’ve journalled on the labels) document a brief moment of happiness in an otherwise difficult day. I’ve talked about my mental health and my post natal depression before so a lot of my son’s first year is a bit of a blur but I remember this day particularly. We wanted to walk along the seafront, like a happy family, like we had imagined ourselves before the reality of a new baby could shake us from the ideal! Except Luigi was grumpy, he didn’t sleep much in the car on the way there so we expected him to conk out while we strolled along the prom. He didn’t. He grizzled the whole time.

We got to the end of the prom and took him out and took this photo while he was briefly quiet and people passed us and cooed and did the whole “oh it goes so quickly” thing and we smiled. Then he started grizzling again (turned out he was an early teether…) and we walked, no, we marched quickly, all the way back along the prom to the car, where I broke down in tears for the hundredth time that week. He’s going to be 14 this week and sometimes even now he can reduce me to tears, but mostly he’s an awesome dude and makes me heart burst with pride.

So anyway, the layout… Cocoa Vanilla obviously. I wanted to use the rainbow paper to signify, much like currently, that good things come after the rain. I didn’t want to lose any of it’s beauty but i’s quite striking and bold so I muted it slightly with the use of the cut file. I backed the whole thing onto a piece of subtle patterned vellum which is a beautiful effect for not much work! I’d created a 2/3rds / 1/3rd background so I took only part of the cut file and saved the rest for another layout (maximum effect, minimum effort – it doesn’t have to be all minuscule backfilling!)

After the background and the cut file and the layered photo, it just needed a bit of embellishing so it was a quickish layout really.

Please do pop back later in the week to see what happened to the rest of the already backed cut file!