Bella Blvd Studio Blog: August Guest Designer: Vicki Boutin

August Guest Designer: Vicki Boutin

Hey there! It’s Vicki Boutin here and I am so excited to be the August guest designer here at Bella Blvd! My family and I reside in Southern Ontario, Canada. The Boutin’s consist of me, my husband Rich, son Riley (11) and daughter Devyn (9). I started paper crafting when my son was born and love everything about this craft! I have a passion for color, patterned paper and techniques. I terrorize my family with my camera. Photography makes me happy ... but drives them crazy! Ha!

As far as accolades go, I was a Creating Keepsakes Hall of Fame winner many moons ago and worked with Scrapbooks, Etc for a number of years, too. These days I write a column called Designer Notebook for Scrapbook & Cards Today magazine and travel lots teaching workshops. This year was a special one with the release of my first book, Creative Foundations. I am happiest when I am buried in creativity.

Bella Blvd … what isn’t there to love?! This is a product line that is just done right. With a great mix of patterns, vibrant colors and the perfect selection of embellishments they make creating fun and easy! I am excited to share a few of the projects I created with you.

"Happiness Is", by Vicki Boutin.

We certainly don’t have a fear of color in this house. Rainbow colors make my heart sing and I like to mix lots of colors together on my pages. The trick is using tone on tone patterns in a variety of colors and then marrying them together with a stripe. I did that here on this layout of Devyn.

I have a passion for circles. I used them here on this page to create subtle interest under the title. They work to ground the chipboard letters and add appeal to the page.

Love the Sophisticates chipboard! I used one of the sun shapes here from the clouds set.

"Riley", by Vicki Boutin.

While color makes me happy, layering pattern makes me giddy! That is yet another thing that Bella Blvd has a knack for. They know how to scale patterns! Their papers always have large, medium and small patterns. On this layout I mixed clouds, polka dots, stripes and more yet it still works. The tone on tone patterns and stripe helps to balance it all out but I love that it is cardstock free.

Here are a few close up images. Again, love the chipboard!!!

"Smile", by Vicki Boutin.

My girl celebrated her 9^th birthday this month and we did a little photo shoot with her besties. The photos I took are chock full of color! For this layout I let the photos guide me and I used lots of color but laid it out on a grey dot. The neutrality of the grey allows the color to really pop.

So here is my challenge to you: It’s time to think about mixing patterned papers and color! Try using a striped pattern paper as your color palette stepping off point. Next, pull out some tone on tone papers and mix pattern scale and size. Finally don’t be afraid to use a neutral pattern and color as the base of your design. I can’t wait to see what you come up with!!!

Man, this was fun! Thanks to Stephanie and Laura for letting me come and play on the Bella blog this month! Now go and make something that makes you HAPPY!!!