Our Merry Little Christmas - Using Leftover Positive Cuts

Hello and welcome to 2016!  My holiday break has just flown by...I'd love to have just one more week before returning to work!  I go back Monday...sigh!  Well, before turning the page on 2015, I was inspired by the positive cuts that I had from the border from this layout. Those cute, little trees should be used, I thought! So when I was flipping through my new Scrapbook & Cards Today 2016 planner and came across the December 2016 sketch, I hatched a plan to cut a few more trees using the Just Nick Studios Tree Trio cut file and other Simple Stories Cozy Christmas papers to put them into that grid pattern. Here's what I came up with.

I wanted to use the brown snowflake paper, but adding trees to it would've made the layout overly busy! So I matted a sheet of white textured cardstock with it instead, and offset it so that a wider edge would show on the left and top. Then I sewed along the edges just inside the snowflake paper and again just inside the white cardstock. I used a cream colored thread to help it stand out just a bit against the white.

I am a sucker for stitching, especially with cut files!  So I laid the trees out until the patterns were to my liking and sewed along the branches of the wider trees.  I knew I wanted the Heidi Swapp "happy" wooden embellishment on my layout so I kept it out until I knew where to adhere it.

The title was fun to create.  I purchased this Simple Stories phrase from the Silhouette store and cut just the "Christmas" out using a piece of the brown snowflake paper, plus two more times using plain cream cardstock so I could adhere them all together to get some depth to the word. I used alpha stickers and trimmed one of the Simple Stories stickers to get the "Our Merry Little" part of the title.

For the photos, I matted with another of the Cozy Christmas papers and put a few phrase stickers on them.  And below the tree photo, I used more alpha stickers to capture the year.

Then it was just a matter of filling in with some simple embellishments like gold sequin stars, gems, and buttons.  Plus adhering "happy" over one of the trees...that wooden phrase just makes me smile!  I felt the top left corner needed just a tiny bit of something, so I adhered the mistletoe sticker with 3D foam tape and adhered three red gems over each berry.  Super cute!

I opted to write my journaling on the back because I wanted to write quite a bit about our Christmas this year, and I didn't want to cram it on that bottom tree or in the bottom right corner.

So now I've used up most of my positive cuts from my previous layout, and it makes me happy to minimize my scrappy waste! What ways have you used your positive cuts?

Have a wonderful rest of your holiday, and I hope you've enjoyed a cup or two of hot chocolate.  :)

Winter hugs,
Majken