Palm Tree Paradise | Melissa Minor | August 2024 Color Kitz

 Hi crafty friends! Melissa Minor here and I'm excited to be sharing another layout with you. The August Color Kitz is full of tropical themed papers and ephemera. I knew just the photos I wanted to document with this kit. My son Logan and his wife Chloe just returned from a trip to Hawaii. I have lots of photos so I'm making a double page layout today. 

I started by choosing four of the patterned papers from the kit. I cut them down to 6x6 squares and glued them to white cardstock to make my base. I love how this brings in so much color to the layout. I repeated this step for page two. Next I started making some embellishments for the layout. I pulled some tropical florals and leaves stamps from my stash and stamped them using a waterproof dye ink. I painted the leaves using the Jilted Jade-Shimmerz. Next I painted the flowers using a combination of both Trippin' In the Tropics-Creameez and Tangy Tangerine-Coloringz. I also fussy cut some flowers from the patterned paper to complete my floral clusters. 

What is a Hawaiian layout without a palm tree? The August Color Kitz comes with a palm tree SVG cutfile. I resized it in cricut design space and added an offset. Next I pulled some paints from my stash. I used Spruce It Up-Shimmerz and No Yoking-Coloringz to paint the top of the tree. For the tree trunk I used a natural sponge and brushed on Distress Oxide ink in the color Vintage Photo. After looking at it awhile I decided I wanted to darken the bark a little. I then used the same method with the sponge and added Distress Oxide ink in Ground Espresso. When using the sponge I drug the sponge across the image from left to right. I used some foam tape and layered one image over the other to give the tree some extra dimension. I'm so happy with the way this tree turned out. I think it's my favorite part of the layout.

Next I added the photos to both of my pages and started building my embellishment clusters. I used a combination of the stamped images and the pre-printed ephemera. I had a few die cut leaves I threw in as well. I also added 2 of the 3 dots that came in the kit. 

I finished my layouts by adding pearls to the center of all the flowers. You can watch my full process video below. I had so much fun making these pages. This is the perfect kit to document tropical adventures.