A good old Bank Holiday Scrap!

Hello Bloglies!

I hope the sun is shining upon your Bank Holiday day.  If its at least dry then its a bonus in Bank Holiday terms eh?!

I seem to have lost my crafty mojo of late - it happens occasionally - and I hadn't ventured to my little Pod in what seemed like an age.  Yesterday, however, we had a free and relatively quiet day and so after pre- preparing the evening meal and feeling very domestic goddess-like, I ventured out there and sat at my desk waiting for inspiration to strike.  I really am a hopeless crafter.  I push papers around for hours, get frustrated with myself that I can't commit to what I want to do and get relentless brain fog as soon as I decide to do some crafting.  Yesterday was no exception.

I've had some photographs of my daughter's eighteenth birthday for nigh on 10 months now and haven't done anything with them so I decided that this would be a starting point.

Colour is a huge thing for me.  I like to think that I have a good eye for colour but my OCD meant that nothing was working with the featured colours in the photographs.  I guess I was focussing too much on the pinks as they are very dominant however when I began laying out the cardstock and papers all I saw was clashing shades which did nothing for the photographs at all.

How frustrating.

Looking beyond the ridiculously garish pink of the sash however, the green of the door seemed to provide a perfect background for my beautiful subject, and delving further into my stash, I found some green wood-grain effect Cosmo Cricket paper that I'd had for an absolute age and which picked up the colour in the photograph beautifully.  This was to be my base.  I wanted a vintage theme, and found a suitable shabby looking lace effect paper in a book of Prima papers I'd been stroking for ages but not actually used.

I've said before that my scrapping idol is the very talented Gabrielle Pollacco, and there was a beautiful layout of hers in the April/May edition of Scrap 365 and so I used this as inspiration, putting my own spin on the basics of her layout.

I ripped the Cosmo Cricket paper in parts, backing it with the lacy effect Prima paper, and spritzed the edges with water which enabled me to gently distress and curl back the torn edge.

Doilies came next - rubbed with a little Distress Ink in Pumice Stone, and filigree die cuts I'd purchased from ebay recently were added to opposite corners by way of balance, again, with a hint of distress ink to remove the stark whiteness of the card stock.

The photographs were placed, and then it was time for my favourite part - the embellies!  Remember the die cut I'd embossed a couple of days ago?  Well, I added  some script paper behind the aperture and some paper flowers to this like so:

Next was the piece of drain cover mesh I'd cut into a heart shape and heat embossed a few weeks ago - more floriferousness was added here, so softening the industrial look of it into something soft and feminine but still edgy.

As the layout features a coming of age, how serendipitous to find an undressed chipboard key in my stash from a magazine freebie from EONS ago.  This was also heat embossed to match the other embellishments, and, you guessed it, more flowers!

I covered a parcel tag in the lacy Prima paper, and then journalled on the back of it, so keeping it private but also documenting the date and what the day meant to us - which is what scrapbooking is all about.

And finally, the finished article.

And..... erm......  the "craftermath".

**Blush**

Oops.  Looks like I'm going to be doing a bit of tidying then eh?!

Happy Bank Holiday to you all

With Love xx