Unboxing to Layout in 15 minutes

Aloha my friends. Today I am sharing the play by play on how I went from unboxing my April Main kit Winter Park to a finished layout in 15 minutes. Are you ready?

7:00 pm-7:05pm

Home from work...surprise! Happy mail awaits. But first...dinner...time out to make a salad and start the grill. Now I get the Silhouette going and in no time I am cutting this month's beautiful butterfly cut file by Maryam Perez! It is quite an intricate file so it takes almost 4 minutes on my old cameo. I decide to use a photo of me on my birthday and it is fitting since this month Clique Kits is also celebrating a birthday! We just turned 4 years old, and entering our 5th year! Whew!

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7:06pm -7:10pm

I audition a few of the Maggie Holmes Flourish pattern papers as a background but decide they are too busy for this cut file. So I pull out my favorite background- white cardstock. I can't ever have enough white cardstock.  Next I grab another cut file that I had previously cut and never used- if you are like me you probably have piles of these somewhere on your desk. It takes me about 3 minutes to back the large butterfly file in some spaces with patterned paper from my kit.  I pull out my favorite embellishment from most of the Clique Kits- the ephemera pack and start to play with my design. To keep the focus on my photo of me celebrating my 49th birthday last August, I used a simple color palette of black and white and just one other color-that gorgeous blue! When I am happy with my design, I snap a photo of it to make sure I don't forget where to adhere the pieces. Here is what the photo looked like:

7:11pm-7:15 pm

Now I choose my title from my drawer full of Thickers and other alphabets. I thought about using the alphabet in the kit but decided it would be too much metallic stuff.  I settle on a word from last November's kit and the number 49 from a really old kit but the color was perfect (I was crazy about that Fancy Pants Designs line.) But getting back to the layout, I am ready to stick it down. Spray adhesive was my choice given the intricacy of the butterflies and the fact that it doesn't show through the vellum pieces. It also took less than a minute to adhere everything! I used some foam tape for the photo because it needed a little lift to rest nicely on the background. I wrote in my journaling just citing the day and occasion the photo was taken and quickly sprinkled a little bit of black ink and done! Wow I think that's a record. Here are a couple of close-ups.

Not all of my layouts are this speedy. Sometimes I take days to complete just one! But it is important to make a little time every day for creating and one of the things that really makes this easy is to have inspiration delivered to my door every month. I know you will all be stalking your mailperson in another week or so and in the mean time head over to the shop to grab some add ons to customize your box before its sealed for delivery!