I have loved decorating my house for all the holidays in the last few years! When I saw all the beautiful patterns in the Cider Season collection I knew that I wanted to make a fun home décor item. So digital items are good for so many different things.

I started by filling in the wood veneer leaves with solid colors from the collection. Traci has a helpful tutorial which will show some of the basics on how to do this. You can easily do this in Photoshop Elements as well.

After I printed them –and then I fussy cut all the leaves and some buttons, as well as a “title”. You can definitely do this more neatly in Silhouette with those fantastic cutting files that Traci provides in every collection but for those of us who are novices or for a small project, it can be easier to just do it by hand. The problem with that is you end up with a with border.

There is an easy fix! I used a brown brush tip marker to color around the edges of each element. It only takes a few seconds per leaf! Look at the difference when I started coloring the edges on the title where the bottom half is already colored.

Here it is all done – a big difference even if it’s not perfect!

After those were done, I wanted to add a little more texture – embossing folders to the rescue! Since it’s printed on white paper you also get a great distressed look along with the embossing.

The final texture layer is the adding string or twine to the buttons to make them look like real buttons! I used DMC cross stich floss in a similar color to the buttons, but it could have been anything – with more or less contrast.

To put it all together – I took a 5x7 frame and printed some of the pattern papers. I layered up my photo, pattern paper, leaves, buttons and few of the felt embellishments from the digital kit to complete the piece. (don’t forget about all the great elements and alphas in the digital kit!) I added the “title” sentiment and mounted that on foam squares – several of the leaves and buttons are also mounted for added dimension.

I have it displayed on a small shelf in my kitchen with my Hocus Pocus Hallmark ornaments (I got them last year but I think they are still available) - another alternative to the title is to use a wood veneer or acrylic piece. I added one from the recent Colorcast Designs release which matches the colors and vibe perfectly!