Yes, I actually made two layouts about boys with the florally, girly collection "Flora No. 1" by Carta Bella. And I really love how they turned out! They are both similar in the way I use the papers: rough edges, different layers and some kind of mixed media.
This is the first one I made: I used white cardstock as a background and stamped the botanical background stamp with three or four different shades of purple and green. Then I started creating a photo mat using patterned papers and and pieces of the ephemera pack.
I was very inspired by a layout by Zoe Guest where she took one of the photo mats and completely crinkled the paper up and then flattened it back out. I really wanted to try that and I love the awesome texture it created. I then took ephemera pieces from the ephemera pack: I just cut them so that they would fit in as layers. There were several flags in the pack as well, but none of the patterns and colors fit the layout, so I just cut my own flags using one as a template.
I had my layers, I knew what the title was going to be but I realized that my whole design was too far to the right and too far down. The latter was easily solved by moving the complete photo mat up a bit. To balance the lopsided design I added two strips of the main papers and a border sticker from the sticker sheet. After I had added the journaling I felt that I needed a bit more black so I stamped the heart from the Simply Stated stamp set in three places on the layout.
The second layout started with a gessoed square on the Peony Posy Bunch pattern paper, for iNSD Beth Soler challenged us to create a layout that used paint in bold strokes and that's what I wanted to try. After the gesso had dried, I applied green acrylic paint and then I did not like the way the green paint looked against the brown background. Now what?
I tried all kinds of different things, until I finally came to the conclusion that this wasn't going to work, so I cut the brown background off (yes, I wasted a piece where I could have fussy cut those beautiful peonies, sigh). It still didn't look right, then my friend Anna suggested ripping the edges instead of cutting and that did the trick. I assume (no, I know now) that the rough strokes of the acrylic paint just didn't go well with clear cut, straight edges. Then I went into my paper stash and found the striped background paper by Maggie Holmes (it is from her Open Book collection), I really liked the way both pieces looked together. But it needed more: rough edges call for layers, so I layered several papers behind the center mat.
To make the green photos pop from the green background, I added the bold black stripes as layers behind as well as some of the ephemera pieces. I used the alpha stickers from the sticker sheet to create my title and then journaled directly on the paint using a Sharpie permanent marker pen. I'm really happy how this layout turned out because I really struggled with it for quite a while.
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