Hello scrappers! It's Lisa Dickinson here with you today, sharing some tips on getting mileage out of those paper collection kits! For me, that means they have to work with both girl and boy layouts. Even if the papers tend towards masculine (lots of plaid or wood) or feminine (lots of florals) I love to find ways to incorporate them into any type of design!

Today I'm working with the Vintage Blessings collection, a great mix of prints in autumnal colors and patterns. Since the first layout features my daughter, I wanted it to have a more girly feel. But instead of working with only the floral patterns or softer colors in the collection, I chose to add feminine flair by creating flowers from several of the patterned papers.

I hand-cut petals from a variety of papers and then adhered each bloom atop a piece of scrap white cardstock. Then I added machine stitching around each petal and adorned the centers with plain wood buttons. Once finished, I trimmed out each flower and adhered them on the page to frame my photo.

The resulting design has a definitively feminine feel even with plaids, ginghams and stripes included. And the flowy script title reinforces the page theme as well. Now, let's see how I used the same paper collection for a boy layout!

In this design, I wanted to focus on more masculine approach since the page is about my son. Though I used many floral papers, I incorporated them into a chevron pattern so they would seem overly girly. And I mixed in some darker plaid ad a few gingham patterns to balance the florals.

For the title, I chose the blocky die-cut Silhouette cut file, Love Today, and cut it out of gray cardstock to further reinforce the masculine theme. A few simple chipboard embellishments finish off this page!

So don't shy away from papers just because you think they'll only work for one gender! Try these tricks for using them on any type of page you might want to create!

SaveSave