Hi everyone! Noreen Smith here from OrganizedandCreativeMom.com sharing a couple of layouts using the gorgeous Spring Garden Papers & Stickers and the versatile Double Heart Punch!
Have you seen all that’s new with CM lately? The new catalog launched April 1st and was chock full of new goodies, and now only a couple of weeks later Creative Memories has launched even more new products – the lovely Secret Garden Collection! 
I fell hard for the beautiful purples, turquoises and greens in this collection, not to mention the lovely floral, geometric and watercolor patterns. The stickers feature beautiful butterfly, heart and flower icons, and there is a whole sheet of word-art sayings and banners which will be perfect to add to layouts and cards! The collection also includes a stunning foiled Album Cover and pre-designed Fast 2 Fab Album Pages. The whole collection makes it so easy to create beautiful layouts for Mother’s Day, or Spring, birthday & nature themes. I chose to use it with some pictures of the special boys in my life – my sons and my husband!
For the first layout I took my cue from the April Sketchy Challenge designed by Kerry Engel. 
Although I create a lot of sketches for my own customers and blog readers, it’s great to have a new sketch each month from Kerry to inspire me and get my creative juices flowing!I cut the green striped paper from the Secret Garden Paper Pack on the diagonal and added it across the upper part of a 12” x 12” piece of White Cardstock.
I used my Purple and Green Dual-Tip Pens, water and an easy “smooshing” technique to create a few watercolor splotches on the white background (it’s simple to get this look with CM pens…check out my technique video here for the easy how-to!)
I matted two photos of my boys and I (which I printed in black & white so that their bright red and blue tee shirts wouldn’t clash with the pretty florals!) onto various pieces of the gorgeous paper, then lightly distressed them by running the blade of my All-Purpose Scissors over the edges to add a little bit of texture.I wanted to place a whole bunch of hearts over the seam where the patterned paper met the cardstock, so I punched a tonne of them out of the various patterned papers with the Double Heart Punch, and then decided to also punch some from solid white cardstock to use as die-cuts that could be backed with patterned paper scraps for additional variety. The Precision Point Adhesive Pen made it easy to adhere the patterned paper to the back of the open hearts.
I placed the punched and layered hearts all along the seam (popping some up with Foam Squares for dimension) to create a gorgeous heart border! I scattered a few more tiny hearts that I punched from Eggplant Cardstock using the 4-Way Hearts and Stars Corner and Hole Punch, then used the last photo space on the sketch for a title created with the new Black Sans Serif ABC/123 Stickers and journaling written with my trusty Black Dual-Tip Pen. Finally, a few faux stitch marks around the edges of the layout made with the Purple and Green Dual-Tip Pens added the finishing touch.
The inspiration for the second layout struck me as I was punching out the double hearts from the white cardstock. I loved the look of the large negative heart “border” that I had inadvertently made, so I set out to purposefully recreate it by measuring and marking where I should punch so that I would have a continuous border around all four sides of a 12” x 12” piece of white cardstock.
I then trimmed off just ¼” from each side of the cardstock and adhered the whole page onto a full-size sheet of patterned paper. I love how the various tones of the bold watercolor pattern peek through the negative shape of the hearts!I added a couple of 8” x 8” squares of turquoise and pale green papers to the centre of the white cardstock as a background for the photos of my husband and I which were mounted on Eggplant Cardstock. Even though our photos have no purple or turquoise in them, I was happy to see that all the colors worked well together!I used various stickers (some mounted with Foam Squares for dimension) to create a title/embellishment cluster of floral, leaf, heart and word-art stickers. I placed more word stickers directly onto my photos to help tell the story, and finished by adding a small amount of journaling with my Black Dual-Tip Pen.
I hope you get a chance to take a look at all that is new from Creative Memories this spring, and to play with some of the fun new punches and beautiful new paper collections!
All Creative Memories products featured in these projects are available in Canada on my CM website, and you can find advisors in the US and other countries by using the Advisor Lookup feature. Please drop by my blog, Facebook group, YouTube Channel or my Instagram feed for more ideas and inspiration – I create layout sketches, cards and other projects which showcase Creative Memories products & tools on a regular basis.
Happy scrapping!
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