Loving the "On a Whimsy" Paper

When I first saw this Fancy Pants paper at CHA I knew it had to be in a kit.I loved the bright colors and whimsical patterns. Honestly though, I really had no idea how I would use it on a layout since it was so busy.

This afternoon, I finally had time to play with this paper and this is what I came up with.
After using this paper, I have a few tips for making this busy pattern work for you.

1. Use a black and white photo. The B&W photo doesn't add any more color to the page, so it's less distracting.
2.Create layers with "calmer" papers. Here I used the green grid and blue grid B-sides of the paper.
3. Trims the swirls. I really loved the swirl design in the paper, but since they took up pretty much the entire center of the paper, they had to be covered. I decided to trim the swirls with my craft knife so that I could still see them and use a larger photo in the center of the page.

Everything on this page is from our April kit.

One last note, I ran out of the "s" on on my puffy alpha sheet, so I just trimmed it from this fun paper.
I like how the combined fonts turned out. Glad I was out of the puffy blue S!