Inspired by the October Mood Board Part 1 - with DT Katie Howard

Good Morning, I hope you are all well this fine October morning. Yes October, already, let that sink in... the downhill slide into Christmas and that is another year done and dusted. Crazy I say!!! Anyone else feeling that way? I know each year seems to disappear quicker and quicker, but sometimes it is just ridiculous how time flies.

Any way, now that is out of my system I thought I would challenge myself and hopefully all of you as well, on looking at our mood board challenges in different ways and maybe spark some inspiration that you may not have had when you first looked at the board.

So to do this properly I will be doing three posts this month, each one taking inspiration from the October mood board, and I will walk you through my thinking. So, let's start with the board!

Isn't it pretty? Full of glorious shades of green, well that is the first and most obvious element, but what else is there that could spark some creativity? That is what we will explore over the next few posts. 

So, for my first page inspired by the board, I was definitely inspired by the greens, but I was also inspired by the circles in the top image so I combined these two into my page.

I chose to use the softer, more blue greens that you can see in the top image. Partly because they worked really well with my photo and partly to show you don't have to include everything you see on the board, you can pick and choose which elements work for you or inspire you to create. 

So to start I cut 2.75 inch circles out of some white cardstock, I used my silhouette cutting machine to do this, but this is certainly a job you could do by hand too. Before I backed the circles with patterned paper I grabbed some of my distress oxide inks (yes these inks, again, what can I say, I LOVE them!) and used the plastic packaging technique to add some colour to the background. I was clever too, I placed another piece of white cardstock underneath and ended up with a second background for another time! The colours that I used were: Bundled Sage, Lucky Clover, Mowed Lawn and Cracked Pistachio.

To back my open circles I used appropriate green papers from the Crate Paper Maggie Holmes Gather and Chasing Dreams collections. You would be surprised at just how much green there was between these collections. I also matted my photo with some of the patterned papers and cut some tabs to tuck in behind the photo and the mat.

I also used some of the embellishments from these collections including vintage buttons, puffy stickers, cardstock stickers, ephemera and chipboard.

I used two different fonts for my title, along the lines of a sub-title and title. For the sub-title I used some Heidi Swapp glitter puffy stickers, which are cursive and fine and you can kind of join them to look like one scripty word. The little black hearts are also from this set.

For the main title I went with a more simple sans serif style font. This one also lends some subtlety through its cross hatch pattern on clear backing, giving it less weight than if it had been solid black. This one is from Pink Paislee Bella Rouge collection and comes with lots of letters and numbers in the set.

Ok, well that is part one of inspired by the mood board. I hope you will swing by for part two with another and different take on the same mood board.

Until then,

Katie x