Magic Layout

Good evening fellow scrappers! So Christmas is just days away...another year almost over. Can the time go by any faster!? Sigh...one of the best things though about this time of year are the pictures we get to take. Here's one of my latest Christmas faves. It's a completely candid shot of my husband, Toby & myself. This was taken on our annual amateur photo shoot for our Christmas cards. None of us were ready, we weren't looking at the camera--we were simply being ourselves. I loved it! So very much that I ended up using this as part of our Christmas cards. :-) Of course I also had to scrap it.

I used the lovely papers Waiting For Santa II by Pion Design for this page. I was able to finally get my hands on them via a wonderful Etsy shop I discovered by the name of Funtoolas. Even the name is catchy! Cindy the owner of Funtoolas puts together lovely kits. She had two December kits this month--I was lucky enough to snag the Pion kit. I had heard much about this Swedish company & the papers were perfect for my photo.

I'm submitting this page for the Once Upon A Sketch (OUAS) December 15th challenge. Here's the sketch my layout is based on. I flipped the sketch on it's side for my page. The theme for this challenge was how you spend Christmas Day. For me Christmas Day is spent quietly. It's quality time with family. We celebrate on Christmas Eve which is tradition for Latin American countries. So on Christmas Eve my family has Christmas dinner & on midnight we open up our gifts around the Christmas tree. We go to bed late--and then spend Christmas Day talking, laughing & sharing memories.

A close up of the flourish chippie & my snowy trees. The chippie is part of the Holly Flourish by Dusty Attic. All of the trees is actually a large stamp by Magnolia called Winter Forest. I stamped the image on dark green patterned paper. Cut them out and randomly colored them with a VersaMarker pen. I then heat embossed them with Peeled Paint distress embossing powder. Next I cut each layer of the tree out--added my 'snow' on the layers & then put the trees back together again with foam dots. This gave my trees a 3D effect. I hope to do these trees again in my next Christmas page--I really liked them a lot! I'll capture a couple of screen shots as I make them. This technique can work for any kind of tree stamp or image that has layers that can be cut out.

The silk flowers came with the kit. Aren't they pretty?

The doe is a die cut by Tim Holtz called Reindeer Flight. He die cut a doe from sticky back canvas for one of his 12 tags of Christmas and this is where the inspiration for my doe came from. The doe is die cut from sticky back canvas, then randomly inked with Frayed Burlap distress ink. I then adhered a bit of mini garland I had in my stash & tied a bell on her neck with a bit of twine.

For the corner I adhered four different kinds of coordinating scraps and then curled them upwards. This gives the illusion of having several pages clustered together. I tucked some hollies & flowers in this corner.

I used a bit of cheese cloth & a crumbled piece of glassine paper by Tim Holtz to mat my picture. The glassine was wrinkled several times & then inked with Walnut Stain distress ink. The metal flower embellishment came with the Funtoolas kit.

The large multi-colored snowflake in the corner was done with a Tattered Angels stencil. I spritzed the stencil with a variety of different mists & smooch. Then I 'kissed' the paper to my misted stencil. This created a washed out multi-colored imprint of the snowflake on my paper. I then heat set it before it smeared.

The random script seen throughout my page is a stamp by Donna Salazar titled 'All My Love'.

A close up of my other smaller tree. Did I mention how much I loved these little trees? :-)

Thanks to all of you who stop by for a visit.