Hey friends, it's Kathleen here again and today I have two more layouts that I made using the pretty Simple & Sweet collection for you.

For my first layout I wanted to use the striped pattern on the back of the Good Things paper as a frame around my white cardstock. I have seen so many gorgeous layout using this pattern as the background, but for some reason it just didn't seem to work for me. But I was determined to use it, so a frame it was ;)

I also immediately knew which photos I wanted to use for that layout. I took them during our last Costa Brava trip in the beautiful town of Cadaqués and the colours in the photo match the colours in the collection just perfectly. There is this exact same blue in the windows and that kind of lavender-pink colour in the flowers.

Since I didn't want to take away from the photos or from the pattern in my frame, I only used two small pieces of patterned paper to back my photos. Other than that, I stuck to the puffy stickers and die cuts to embellish the rest of my layout. I did also add in one of the stitched hearts from The Mix No. 2 and I punched two small yellow flowers from the same paper that I used for my frame.

For my journaling I used a label (or ticket?) that I cut from the Fresh Air paper. I don't know why, but when I have some kind of journaling spot on my layout, it is a lot easier for me to actually include handwritten journaling (other than as hidden journaling) - so this was the perfect solution.

To finish it off, I just scattered some enamel dots around the page, splattered some paint and added my title (with a mix of the puffy stickers and the gold alpha stickers).

I am very happy with how this turned out because it has the same airy but colourful feel that you will find in Cadaqués. Now let's have a look at the second layout:

The idea for this layout actually came to me while I was working on the first one. If you have a look at that again, you will see that yellow flower to the left of the "beautiful" sticker which I punched with one of my hand punches. I had also punched a few of the flowers from the Simplicity paper but didn't end up using them. However, when I saw the pink and yellow ones together, I thought that they looked really cute and decided I would try to create some kind of rainbow(ish) coloured layout with them.

So I punched some more from various papers (again, for the yellow ones I used Good Things, for the orange and coral red ones I mostly used Happy Life but I did have to go back to my Let Your Heart Decide stash and the Instinct paper to get some more of that colour) and then arranged them in strips on my layout. I had also punched some green and blue ones, but when I put them all on the layout, it didn't look right.

That's when I decided to bring in those two colours in another way. For the green strip of paper at the bottom I used the Good Company paper, and to bring in the blue I used some blue sewing thread and the gorgeous blue puffy alpha stickers.

I also added in some bits and pieces from the ephemera pack and added them to the corresponding colour. Lastly, I stamped those three scribbled flowers from the Playful Animal Friends 2 stamp set, sprinkled some enamel dots around and, of course, added some paint splatters. And that's it. Very simple but I like how it looks.

I hope you like these layouts and they inspire you to get creative with the Simple & Sweet collection!

Thanks for stopping by!

Kathleen