Hello friends, Iris here on the blog today.  Fall is our family's favorite season. We're eager for Fall as soon as school starts, but here in California, some years it comes a bit late.  So I was tickled when I saw The Cut Shoppe's Finally Fall cut file that includes the "Feeling Fallish" sentiment. It makes the perfect title for this story about my daughter playing in a pile of leaves in December.  Since she's wearing a non-fall colored shirt, the oranges and pinks of the Forever Fall line made it easy to scrap this photo.

My goal was to emphasize vertical movement. On my background I splattered pink, orange, and teal inks starting from the top and widening towards the bottom of the page so that they mimic how leaves fall and scatter downward.  I printed my photo tall and skinny (3" x 6") and matted it in the stripey Get Cozy paper.  Stripes are always so fun for photo mats and I love that this one includes all the colors. I anchored my photo with a bit of the diagonal striped washi.

To back my vertical title, I used some of the rectangular stickers from the 4x6 Stickers pack. I don't normally turn to those. They seem well suited for planners, but my planner doesn't have blocks of spaces.  So I was thrilled to finally use them! They fit perfectly in the narrow openings of this cut file and the tiny scale of the patterns means you can still see the designs.  I love hand stitching on my layouts but hadn't done much of it recently, so after I was sure of the title's placement, I used my hole piercer on the scripty word, snipped it off the top of the title, and hand stitched directly on the background in a dark orange thread that matches.

Raining down above my photo are a cascade of die-cut and sticker banners and leaves. I filled a couple of the blank banners with heart stickers and randomly machine stitched through some of them. 

I hand wrote my journaling to the right side of the photo to balance out the large title on the left. For a bit of texture on this side, I stapled a little strip of cording that I knotted. To continue the vertical design all the way to the bottom, my date is stamped on a die-cut in the space below the photo, finished off with a heart sticker.

Since my photo and the embellishments skew towards the right, I felt the left side needed something more. I added a thin strip of the stripey paper along the left edge of the layout, tucked a small word sticker under it, and as the final touch, stapled another piece of the cording above the words, to repeat how the cording is above my journaling.

I just can't get enough of the Forever Fall collection.  It's so versatile to capture all the Fall (and Fallish) memories, even when our kids aren't wearing the traditional seasonal colors!