Hello Lovelies and welcome to this stop along the Citrus Twist Blog Hop for (Inter)National Scrapbook Day! You have arrived here from Alena’s blog, and be sure to scroll to the bottom to follow along to the next stop! I hope you are able to get creative today and I know you will find tons of inspiration along this blog hop. There are some fun challenges today so be sure to check out the Citrus Twist blog and Facebook group, and don’t forget to comment below to be entered into today’s drawings!
My layout today began with the Citrus Twist cut file that is included in the Subscriber Workshop on the site each month. I was completely smitten with the butterflies and made them a main focus of this page. First I cut them out with just plain white card stock (Close To My Heart) and laid the negative cut over another card stock for spritzing. I have used Heidi Swapp Color Shine in Mint to spray the color.
Once I sprayed the color and lifted the card stock, I realized that a lovely halo of color had formed around the elements of the cut file, so I adhered my cut file over that to allow that color to show behind. I also added bits of stitching using my sewing machine just to add more texture.
I was challenged to use embellishment clusters on my page, so I have created three clusters using elements from the Excursions Life Crafted Kit. At the bottom of my page I used a label from the cut apart sheet, plus word art and a few florals from the Excursions kit. I also stamped a word sentiment from this month’s stamp set directly to the background page. Also notice one of my favorite elements on the page: the stamping around the globe!
A second embellishment cluster is located around my photo. This is a photo from last year of our four children hanging out in downtown Kernersville, NC (our hometown). I added layers of patterned paper around the photo and have tucked my embellishments in between those pages. Some of them are popped up with pop dots as well, for more dimension.
The third embellishment cluster is at the top of the layout and forms the complete triangle for good design. It is very simple, with just a tab and a few florals from the ephemera pack.
Now it is time to visit Marsha (click to be directed to her blog post!), and continue hopping along until you end up on the Citrus Twist Kits Instagram page. When you get to Instagram after visiting all of our Creative Team contributions, just do the following:
* Like us – @citrustwistkits
* Tag us in a message to let us know you completed the blog hop on our NSD post
* Tag a friend in your message
We’ll be doing random drawings throughout NSD 2019 and will message and tag you if you win. We’ll be giving away everything from some of our new Life Crafted albums to embellishments to stamps and more. There is no purchase necessary to win.
Hello Lovelies! Today I wanted to share with you the projects I have completed for the Citrus Twist Design Team for the month of April! Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the page as well, where you can view my process video for this Project Life layout.
My favorite layouts to create with the Citrus Twist kits are most definitely pocket pages! Pocket pages are my jam, and the April Make It A Venti kit is perfect. My 2019 album is coming along and I loved using this kit for these two weeks in February. The soft colors with pinks and purples and a pop of blue made this layout easy to pull together.
I also created a bit in my Life Crafted album this month. I absolutely love this format and love just creating for fun.
The April kit was mostly coffee themed, but still a very versatile kit! I am not a fan of coffee, but I was inspired to think about other mug-related things and that inspired me to create this fun layout about mug cakes! I love these things and we eat them quite a lot in our house, so it was perfect to document here.
I also documented my love of Diet Coke for this layout that was shared on Instagram! I had so much fun creating that mixed background, and notice the vertical embellishments on the left. Such an easy trick!
This mixed media layout is perhaps one of my all-time favorites. I was inspired by one of the patterned papers in the kit for my background, and that amazing floral cut file. What an amazing creative month! Be sure to check out the Citrus Twist blog, and watch my process video below to see my pocket page!
Thank you so much for joining me! See you again soon!
Hello Lovelies, this is a new series I want to share with you on my personal journey of building a brand from the ground up while coping with chronic mental illness. I am not a medical professional and therefore do not offer medical advice, only stories of my personal journey in hopes that others might be inspired as well. Mental illness lies to us every day, and it is my hope through sharing my stories, my truths, that you might find hope and strength too. If you would like to learn more about my journey I invite you to read the Larkindesign Brand Story. You can read all the posts in this series here. Thank you for being here!
Thank you all so much for your wonderful reception to this new series. Your thoughts and love sent my way were all so positive and I am thankful for each and every one of you! Today I have a mixed media layout to share with you and I want to use the blog post to share a little of the back story with you. It was really difficult last week to acknowledge and act on the realization that creating the digital collections was not serving me well. One of the things they don’t tell you, when you start your own brand, is that it is highly possible that you will try many different things before you succeed. For many business owners, they do actually launch successful the first time, and grow amazing businesses seemingly on their first try. For some it happens that way, and for me it has not happened that way at all!
For some, building a brand comes after many trials and errors, and it can be especially challenging to do this with trauma, PTSD, depression, and any other mood disorders. What that actually looks like in real life is that trying many different things means many different things not working out. That means failure. There is no denying that, for whatever reason, the digital kits I created failed to sell. I am pretty educated and have a pretty good idea of why, and in the end it’s not productive to beat myself up, or feel bad about it, it simply is. The hardest thing, actually, as a survivor, is not taking it too personally, accepting it as part of the learning experience, and being gracious to myself and others as I go through this.
I follow Elsie and Emma of A Beautiful Mess, and have long been so inspired by their creativity and their business successes. I find it most inspiring that they will tell you how many times they, too, have personally experienced these trials and errors in their business. They call it pivoting their business. When something doesn’t work out, simply try something different. And keep trying until you get it worked out. I love their messages in this regard, and it is incredibly uplifting to hear that even incredibly successful business women have struggled to find the right fit, too.
On the outside, the trials and errors of building a brand can make the artist seem disorganized, even untrust-worthy. You’ve heard it all: “oh they just didn’t know what they were doing,” “they didn’t know what they were getting into,” “they couldn’t just stick with it,” and on and on. And maybe all of those things are true. On the other hand, no one really knows what they are doing and no one really knows what they are getting into when they start a creative brand from scratch. Even if someone pivots their business by stopping something that isn’t serving them, they are still not giving up and they are still working towards their goal. I have stopped making journal cards for right now, but I am still showing up and I am still working towards my overall goal of making a profitable business and I am not giving up. Not yet, anyway!
But the challenge with this side of building a brand, and also dealing with mood disorders, are the lies that trauma and abuse and suffering tells us. Through this entire journey I have had a chorus of negative voices that have told me I don’t deserve to be successful, I am not possibly good enough or talented enough for this, I must be crazy to think I could ever make this work, and on and on. Have you seen Girl Boss on Netflix? Sophia Amoruso goes through this to some extent, and at one of the crucial points in the series she tears up everything in her apartment and ends up screaming at herself in the mirror, and the mirror screams back at her, all the negative things she has internalized about herself. It’s such a crucial moment in the movie because she faces those awful voices head on, goes to get her surgery (practices self care) and then comes back more determined than ever.
I promise I did not tear up our house last week, and I didn’t tear up all my hard work, but in some ways deciding to pivot my business right now is an act of self care and a part of this winding road I am traveling on. It was messy and tearful, just as Sophia’s messy turn-about was messy and fraught with the realities of being human and having serious challenges with self esteem. And after a few days of self care, loving private messages from e-friends, and the support of my family in real life, I am back with new hopes and dreams (and it is highly possible I will create more product at a later date, just not right now).
In this process, however, I am learning volumes about myself and my own presence of mind, my own strengths, my own weaknesses, and while building a brand is happening, building ME is also happening. It is frightening, at some stages, and elating, at other stages. I have always heard when you go through re-pivoting your brand, and you are unsure of what to do, to go back to what you love. Go back to the basics. What I love and what my basics are has always been pocket pages, my pocket page classes, focusing on creating layouts, and most importantly, inspiring other creatives. I have long been trying to figure out how to bring my passion for creativity together with my journey of healing, and then this series was born and it has clicked.
And while I am working and healing and processing and struggling and succeeding, I can still create and must still create, and I find the art of creating so incredibly cathartic. That process is also important to share with you, because I know that even if you aren’t trying to build a brand, chances are you arrived here as a fellow creative. Maybe you too are a survivor – I think all humans are survivors in one way or another, and it is messy but beautiful, and we get to reflect these amazing things in our creative work. So here is the take away for today. As I was building my title for this layout, I was going to just write “learning how to love myself,” and I realized there was most definitely more to this.
I had been approaching my journey to healing as a single destination – that one day I would be healed, that one day I would be able to love myself fully and wholly, with scars and all. I am proud to say that I have learned a little more about loving myself through this part of my journey, and I have learned that loving myself is the journey to healing. That may sound so basic to some, but for me it clicked. And I also realized that there isn’t a specific destination, that this is a lifelong journey. I am so thankful you are with me on this journey, messy and beautiful. If you’d like to see my process for creating this layout, you may view it here.
Are there negative voices in your creative life too? How do they manifest themselves for you? I would love to hear from you. Join me next time as we continue this creative journey. Thank you for being here and being part of this community!
Hello lovelies, today I am sharing this fun scrapbook layout using Pinkfresh Studio Let Your Heart Decide collection plus a Silhouette cut file from Paige Evans!
Have a look at this fun layout!
My photo, and therefore the story of this layout is about Nick and the time back in February that we went to the vintage arcade in Winston Salem. I chose a selfie we took on that day together as the starting point for this layout.
I absolutely love this cut file from the Silhouette store designed by Paige Taylor Evans. I cut strips of paper to adhere behind the pattern of the cut file. As I laid out the strips I tried to switch up the colors to add variety and texture to this background, and I adore how it turned out! Once the background was complete then I was free to add my photos and embellish.
I loved all the textures and colors in the Let Your Heart Decide collection and made a point to include my favorites here! I did use the blue frame to make the photo pop off the background, and then I layered leaves and hearts and my journaling around the photo.
I have kept my journaling really simple for this layout. The who, what, where, and when are here at the bottom of the photo, and I added my why near the top of the photo. I kept this so simple for this layout and that is ok!
My title is placed vertically on the layout, which feels somewhat unexpected but I really love it. It does an excellent job to balance the photo on the layout and I loved using those alphabets!
Hi everyone, today I am continuing my series called 50 First Layouts, where I share a product collection and then create layouts based on those products! I am still working with Dear Lizzy Stay Colorful, and today’s layout is called Hey Good Looking! Check out my process here.
My photo I am working with is of Emberlynn, who is now 13 and she loves the camera! We went to downtown Winston in February to visit a vintage game arcade called Reboot, and I took this photo while she was hanging out in the seating area.
Can you tell I am loving this collection? The colors and the icons are awesome! This layout began with the happy little yellow bicycle (did you know Little Yellow Bicycle used to be a scrapbooking brand?!!) and a beautiful photo of Emberlynn.
I also chose a Silhouette Cut File from Paige Evans and I have backed these florals with other patterned papers from the collection. You can download this cut file here.
I cut two of the floral cut files and adhered one to the top of the page, and the second one to the bottom of the page. My photo is then adhered slightly to the right of those files. Now my embellishments can fill in around the photo.
I have also used the Dream On stamp set from Pinkfresh Studio, which I just absolutely adore! The hand drawn rectangles house stamped sentiments and I used the patterned circle to add more interest to my background paper.
I also added a bit of stitching to the layout around the floral elements. I can’t really do much hand stitching because it makes my hands hurt, but I do love to add texture with the machine! I just went randomly around the floral cut files and I also underlined the stamped words at the bottom of the page.
Such a fun and easy layout to create! Thank you for joining me today!
