Hello everyone!  Iris here with a layout about one of those common summer activities when you have little kids - swim lessons.  I had a series of photos of my daughter braving her very first dive into the deep end that I've been waiting for the perfect papers. I've found those in the Hello Summer collection.  

To start things off, I printed my photos as a collage of three columns and hand-outlined them for a whimsical, comic strip feel. I topped each column with word strips from the Combo Stickers. The wave pattern of Oh Happy Day makes a great background for pool pictures.

Large photo collages stand alone quite nicely without many layers, but I wanted to use a variety of the bright, cheery papers.  Inspired by the speech bubbles in the collection, I cut some large ones with encouraging words and hearts from the Silhouette store (Karla Dudley) and backed them with several of the papers. (Life is Good, Catching Rays, and 3x4 Journaling Card Elements)  I loved many of the sayings in this collection, so I added some from the word strips in the 4x6 Stickers pack onto the cut-outs.  Choosing the black and white ones to go on top of all those colorful papers kept it from looking too busy. 

I'm a big fan of the trend to pair "hello" with everything. It serves as an invitation for the good stuff that follows it. Like summer, right?! I used the large "hello" from the 6x12 chipboard set for my title, adding small tile alphas from my stash for "diving".  The left-hand side of this design is packed with die-cuts and colorful papers; the oversized black and white word catches the eye to bring it across the page.

This layout is about the fun, but the story of this summer milestone for my daughter was important to me.  I printed my journaling in bold black on white strips, darker and larger to distinguish them from the word strips on the left.  The journaling bridges the gap between the embellishments and the title. 

I layered smaller fussy-cut speech bubbles and circle stickers along the column of speech bubbles. Ink splatters (Heidi Swapp Color Shine in Ocean) and a sprinkling of black and blue enamel dots contrast from the other colors and serve to bring in the blue from the photo and black from the title up to the rest of the layout.  All the circular embellishments are reminiscent of spraying water droplets. 

Well, school is out, summer is officially here, and Simple Stories has a fabulous collection full of juicy color, fun icons, and great words for all our summer scrapping!