Kraft+ February Challenge ~ Mango Breeze

Welcome to the New Kid on the Block, Kraft+ (also known as K+).  K+ is a new challenge blog devoted to all things Kraft!  They have launched their first challenge today, the February Challenge: Mango Breeze, and it is spectacular!

K+ has an awesome lineup of talented ladies in their DT, and I was pleased (and a little bit relieved) to see all different styles of inspiration for this first challenge.  There are beautiful layouts full of embellishment, lots of inks and paints and assorted ephemera; but then there were equally beautiful, clean and simple designs.  I perused the whole lineup of DT inspiration, but I kept coming back to the first one, by Linda Eggleton, and in a snap I knew the layout I wanted to make.

I travelled to the USA in June of 2014 with my bestie, and we spent three glorious days in New Orleans.  The Mango Breeze colours screamed "Bourbon Street" to me.

I started with flicking drops of ink on my Kraft base and smearing them in streaks with the nozzle of the bottle to spread them out.  This indicates to me the excitement and diversity that is Bourbon Street, New Orleans.  I also coloured some texture paste into an orange/pink hue (the photo does not do it justice, unfortunately) and slapped that on the bottom left corner.  Whilst the paste was still wet, I used the Kaisercraft 'Rocks' stamp to give the paste some texture to look like cobblestones.  Once the paste was almost dry, I used Distress Ink in Pumice Stone and my ink blending tool to go over the stamped area to add depth and detail to the texture of the cobblestones.

There is a streak of white heat embossing across the top that I wanted to use to balance out the page and to provide a lighter backdrop for the letters in the word "COLOURS".  I have cut out the word "COLOURS" using Stampin' Up!'s "Little Letters Thinlits Dies".  I used the Mango Breeze inspiration palette in reverse order for the letters in the word.

The letters for NO, LA (which stands for New Orleans, LA [Louisiana]) are from an old Heidi Swapp plastic alphabet set I've had for positively eons.  The colour wasn't right, so I ran an emery board over the tops of the letters to roughen them up and added ink to the top.  I then used a Sakura Gelly Roll Moonlight pen to add some additional detail.

I have used the negative space created by cutting out the words "BOURBON ST" from black craft foam to add a bit of extra interest to the page.

I'm thrilled with how this page came together, and I think that this Kraft+ challenge site has inspired me to perhaps create all of my New Orleans pages on Kraft (and maybe even my entire trip, but I'm not too sure about that yet...)

I can't wait to see what everyone else comes up with!

Deb.
xx