Hi everyone,

I recently treated myself to some scrap goodies for Mother’s Day and my birthday, amongst what I purchased was some of the lovely masculine Wolf Pack collection by Heidi Swapp. It’s a gorgeous collection with lots of potential and versatility, I saw myself being able to create layouts about my sons, daughters, grandson and Christmas. The lovely outdoor pine forest, mountains and starry nights would work well for our traditional, annual, Christmas tree hunt. The other papers, a mix of contemporary and cultural patterns in black, white and shades of greens, and the wood grain can be used for recording many special events or moments.

For this layout, I chose to use three of the collection papers, the Zodiac, the wood grain (B side of Mama Bear) and the black and white bold stripe (B side of Woodsy). I also wanted to use the washi tape and the very cute puffy stickers.

To start with I used some texture gesso paste and a Kaisercraft stencil (Distressed Dots)  on my background, a mix of stripe and wood grain paper. The stencil gives a lovely grunge effect.

After drying of the gesso, I applied Tim Holtz Distress Oxide inks. You just stamp the pad on a smooth surface, mine is a piece of black acrylic, and add water to the ink, then paint the ink onto the stencilled gesso. The fluid ink runs into all the crevices of the gesso and blends together beautifully.

While that dries I got to work on mounting my photo. I used the banding strips trimmed off the papers, each strip has a print motif on it of one of the other papers in the collection…wolves, bears, etc. Because they are little strips and I am using them as edging mounts, you can’t identify them as bears, etc.

Next, I mounted the photo onto the background and began to embellish the layout. Even though the papers are quite masculine and I am using a photo of my teenage son, I couldn’t stop myself from adding some sparkle and shine to the layout. The Zodiac paper features the night sky and astrology motifs and I wanted to highlight this in my design. I used a variety of sequins in crystal, navy, aqua and green to decorate and enhance the layout. Then, I splattered on some watercolour paint in white, green, dark blue and brown.

The final touch was to add the puffy star stickers, some moon washi tape and some cotton thread bunches, then a few Tim Holtz quote stickers and a little extra splatter.

I decided not to add a title, the layout was to capture my son at this stage of his life when he was full of dreams and possibilities for the future. The quote stickers were appropriate and told the story, a title would draw the viewers eye away from the photo.

I love how this turned out and it was fun to create. I can’t wait to use the rest of this collection. Who else is using the Wolf Pack collection? Share links to your work in the comments section, remember that you need to click on the title of the post to open the page to comment.

Happy scrapping 🙂