Inspiration Wednesday!

Happy mid-week, scrappers! Nikki here with a little inspiration for your bright, summery, vacation-y, party-y layouts. I used one of Mary's Paper Pieces templates and the wonderful Thoroughly Amused kit for this (appropriately) LOUD parade layout:

I love how the paper strips add plenty of fun, and the photo arrangement is perfect for a bunch of semi-similar pics. This would be a fabulous basis for a July 4th layout (fireworks photos, anyone?), a swimming party, a ballgame, present-opening at a birthday party or baby shower... all those occasions where you may snap a bunch of great pics that all look kind of similar, but the whole bunch of them adds up to a page that really FEELS like the event. (I even used the same template with a totally different "vibe" for whalewatching photos!).

You can grab the template pack here,

and get Thoroughly Amused here

I also used Serendipity, Alpha-Bits, and the blog freebie alpha Bright & Beautiful. One little trick I pulled... the wordstrips from Serendipity were quite a bit softer than the bold colors in Thoroughly Amused. I pumped them up with a hue/saturation layer in PSE, simply pulling the "saturation" slider to the right until I was satisfied that they'd been "emboldened" enough. No need to check the "colorize" box; just pull that single slider to give soft shades some umph!

Happy scrapping!