Life is Better with Extra Toppings by NICOLA CAMPBELL

Hi everyone,

Nicola here sharing my next layout from the April 2026 Scrapaholix Kits, which are based around Shimelle's Live The Dream collection with American Crafts. The blog post walking you through the contents of both the main and add-on kits can be found here.

I came up with this idea that I wanted to build a big ice cream out of the papers to go with this photo I picked to scrap of Spud making googly eyes at all the toppings he got with his ice cream one time (this collection is perfect for photos that have anything to do with sweet treats). I didn't feel I'd get it nice and symmetrical by drawing it free-hand (it didn't have to be perfect, but the cone wouldn't have looked right to me if it was wonky) so I printed off a generic clipart image of an ice cream cone and cut it apart so that I could use it as a template for my ice cream pieces.

I cut the cone out of the woodgrain side of the Emotives patterned paper (comes in the add-on kit), the lower blob of ice cream out of the Fussy Bazzill cardstock (main kit), and the top ice cream blob out of the Cookies patterned paper (add-on kit). I gave myself a bit extra around the top when I cut out the cone and lower blob so that they would tuck behind the layer on top of them, so I didn't give myself a trickier lining up job than I needed to.

With my ice cream building blocks ready, now I needed a background - I took a sheet of Bazzill white cardstock (you get one in the main kit) and splattered it with watered down Distress Oxide in both Kitsch Flamingo and Salvaged Patina.

After giving the splatters a couple of minutes to dry, I stuck down the pieces of my ice cream towards the left-hand side of my background and placed the photo to the right, slightly higher than the vertical midpoint because I knew I wanted to leave room underneath for my title. I triple-backed my photo on the 3 coloured Bazzill cardstocks from the main kit - first Turquoise, then Fussy, then Blue (I printed my photo to have a thin white border by using a custom size on my Canon Selphy, so the white isn't an additional layer on top of that triple backing).

To embellish, I took 3 ice cream cones and the word "enjoy!" from Shimelle's Reasons To Smile cardstock stickers (from my stash; the colours in Reasons To Smile work really well with Live The Dream) - I placed the 3 ice creams in a kind of tower up the bottom left of the photo; the left-hand side of each sticker has some foam strips underneath because of the difference in levels created with the thickness of the triple photo backing. I wanted the "enjoy!" on a higher level of dimension than the ice creams, so the whole sticker has foam strips underneath and I doubled up along the top where it isn't sitting over the photo.

Next I took 3 gummy bears and the cute smiling marshmallows from the Live The Dream ephemera icons pack (which I picked up to go with these sweet-themed kits) and clustered them around the bottom right of my photo. I did a similar thing as mentioned above with the purple and green gummy bears being half on foam strips to keep them level with the triple backing and the marshmallows being all on foam strips with some doubling up so they are higher. Then I took some small hearts from the Reasons To Smile cardstock stickers and sprinkled them around my ephemera.

To finish off, I rather liked the title "Life Is Better With Extra Toppings", which is quite a long title so I went stash diving for some smaller alphas so I could fit it all in and found the Happy Life Thickers from the Paige Evans Whimsical collection (remember that one, what was that, 2018?) and picked out the different coloured letters I needed to spell out my title. I did my letters all up-and-down because I thought that made them look kind of like they'd been sprinkled like the ice cream toppings (plus it means I don't have to worry about lining them up neatly).

I hope this has given you some inspiration for the April 2026 kits and I look forward to bringing you more layouts very soon. In the meantime, there's lots of crafty inspiration available on the Scrapaholix and The Mad Scrapper blogs, so do pop over and take a look.

Happy crafting! x

Supplies used:

Shimelle Live The Dream Ephemera Icons

Shimelle Reasons to Smile Cardstock Stickers

Paige Evans Whimsical Happy Life Alpha Thickers