Hello friends! Adding a sense of movement to your layouts is a great way to draw the viewer into your story and is a design principle in paper crafting. There are many shapes that can be incorporated to add movement including swirls. Our Flannel and Frost collection has a few sparkly brown swirls in the planner add-on kit. But, swirls can be added to your layout with hand stitching, cut files and patterned papers as well as predesigned embellishments like those in our planner add on kit, or stamps, die cuts, and other types of ephemera. Remember the key to a strong design is in controlling the eye's movement across your page and incorporating the swirl shape is a great way to achieve this result. Odessa created a swirl of movement in her Simple Dori traveler's notebook with kit papers. She notes, "I’m not usually the type to do things the obvious way so why would a swirly layout be any different? I’ve done a few Traveler’s Notebook pages inspired by quilts and today’s page is another one! I’ve always loved the look of Bargello quilts and used a similar technique to make this quilt. Bargello quilting involves sewing together strips of fabric, cutting them in the opposite direction and then offsetting them to create an impressive wavy pattern." "I cut thin lengthwise strips of all of the papers from the Flannel & Frost collection and arranged and adhered them on a thin paper. I turned the paper around and cut strips from it agains the direction of the original cuts. I then glued them down to a plain page in my Daisy Dori with each strip a little offset, creating some dramatic movement for my background. It’s a fun way to play with the patterns and then you can use them all for your background instead of trying to pick!" "I kept it simple with such a patterned background and featured a simple circular photo on top of a cardstock matte. On the other side of it I used the diecut letters from the Memory Keeping Classified kits to spell Fall and added a diecut flag underneath and some of the adorable puffy script letters above. To finish it off I used the sparkly twine that came with the planner kit as a nice border around my photos." "Cutting up papers and turning them into new patterns is so much fun!" Wow! Odessa's layout is absolutely stunning and totally captures the attention of the viewer. And as Odessa has shown us, quilt patterns like Bargello make wonderful templates for paper crafting designs. Melina has incorporated movement in her journal with swirls. "When I saw this challenge, I knew I wanted to use the glittery sticker strips from the Flannel and Frost Planner Add On Kit for my swirls. Then I decided one swirl just wasn’t enough so I added another with the baker’s twine found in the Main Planner kit." "I love how it adds to the card and sunflower sticker. Of course I also love the “rule of 3” when creating so I added one more swirl element with my pen and made a wind swirl for the leaf stickers/die cuts to dance on. A combination of alpha stickers and die cuts completed my title." "If you ever find yourself journaling and your pen decides to fade away like mine did here, you can use different shades of the same color ink to finish out your spread. It looks intentional and no one will ever know. Well of course, unless you tell them!" Melina's journal layout is adorable and we love that she is sharing three different ideas for adding movement to her layout with swirls. Thank you for joining us today. We hope you are able to set aside some time to get crafty with your Cocoa Daisy kits this weekend. Be well and safe! ~Robin