My Sixteen-Year-Old Self With Gail

“Sixteen”, by Gail Lindner.

I recently came across a photo of myself when I was sixteen years old. Immediately I was inspired to create a layout with it! So I took a photo of my photo (just using my phone camera) and quickly and easily edited it and cropped it to square, ready to print out and add to a layout.

I couldn’t go past using the She Blooms collection from Illustrated Faith first because I love the color scheme in that collection and secondly because the whole feeling of the collection perfectly matched the idea of a layout about my younger self.

With sentiments such as ‘bloom’, ‘shine’ and ‘blessed’ it was just so perfect! I started by cutting some blocks of my favourite patterns and layering them all around my photo. These layers are then perfect for tucking in extra details such as tabs and die cuts.

The eye is immediately drawn to the centre cluster containing my photo but I did balance out all that white space with the bold pattern strip across the top of my layout and a few mist splatters around my center cluster.

I typed up my journaling and added it to the bottom of the layout. It was actually quite tricky to put into words some retrospective words of wisdom to 16-year-old me! In fact, I might even go back and write a longer “letter” to myself and tuck it behind my layout! I hope you can read my words in the photo below.

So I would love to know . . . what would you tell your sixteen-year-old self?

Supplies:
IF She Blooms: BW Floral Stripe, Take Root Pink, Blossom Script, 3x4s, Paper Pieces, Chipboard Icons, Treasures & Text; IF Enamel Hearts: Oh My Heavens Mix; IF Homespun Stickers: Black Eyed Peas