Hello everyone! It's Lisa Dickinson here today to share a few tips on using pattern on your pages! Patterned paper is the most abundant product in my scrap stash, and I love to incorporate lots of it into my pages. But sometimes pattern can be intimidating. Does plaid go with floral? Can you mix stripes and dots? The answer is YES when you use one of my favorite tricks to combine patterns...just follow the rainbow!

When you want to use lots of patterns in one design, using a ROYGIBIV order is a fail proof method. Mother Nature knows what she's doing, and the same color combo will look great on your page. On this layout, I'm using the Cabin Fever collection and have featured seven different patterns from the line.

While there are no orange, green or purple papers in this line, it was easy to sub in some of the patterns (a tan dot for orange and a multi colored plaid for green) and still get the rainbow effect. Even though the patterns are completely different, they read as harmonious because of the order in which I adhered them.

So what if you don't want the whole spectrum of color on your page? It's easy to select just a portion of the rainbow - say red, yellow and orange - to use in your design. On this page about my son's swim team, I used green, teal, aqua and navy to help reinforce the water-theme of the layout.

I used a wave-like cut file with holes to fill a large portion of the page. I filled the holes with a variety of Simple Stories papers in the selected colors of green, aqua and navy. The patterns range from dots to gingham, and text to geometrics, but they all work together because of the arrangement of colors. 

So the next time you want to punch up the pattern on your page, try this rainbow order technique. You're sure to end up with a colorful, happy page you'll love (and isn't that even better than a pot of gold??)

Happy Scrapping!

SaveSave