April Lilli Design Team: In love with my new hat.

After receiving the Winter Wonderland collection from April Lilli, I went back to my wintery photos from several years ago and found five stories that I thought would work with the color scheme. Since I only started scrapbooking in 2014 I didn't have to worry whether any of my stories had been documented yet.

I figured, if I printed all of them, it would be easier to make the two projects required for my DT assignment. Well, it didn't work that way - I ended up with five layouts for all of the five stories, because ideas for the next layout started forming while I was still working on the previous layout. And I just couldn't let them go. So here is the first: "In love with my new hat". Several years ago I used my birthday money to buy a hand knit hat from Monika and it was my favorite hat for a long time.

I was immediately drawn to the deep brown of the paper and so I needed to use that one on my first layout, I divided the paper in thirds and cut a 4 inch strip. The photo was then placed where the horizontal and vertical 4 inch lines meet. For the layers behind my photo, I grabbed a vellum bag with gold dots, papers that I ripped using my ruler and several die cuts from the die cut pack. I also fuzzy cut the large snow flake from one of the cards from the cut-apart sheets.

I really loved the red chipboard heart and incorporated it into my title, which is made from white older 7paper letter stickers as well as even older brown Authentique tile letter stickers. In the beginning I did not mean to put the journaling on the tag in the vellum bag, but after I had a general idea of what the layout would look like, this was essentially the perfect spot for it.

I used several phrase stickers from the 12x12 sticker sheet as well as the sticker pack for further embellishments. And then I almost forgot to use enamel dots because I am such an enamel dot hoarder. But the idea of being on a Design Team is to showcase all the products, right? So I generously added them to all the right places and I really think they add the finishing touches.

Over the next two weeks I will be sharing the other layouts that I made using this collection and will also have a video at the end of the month. If you haven't seen my unboxing video yet, check it out here: Unboxing Simple Stories Winter Wonderland.