Born To Shimmer

Is anyone else like me?
Are you intrigued when your favourite designers post about thier process of building a page?
Do you love finding out how they gained thier inspiration and how they pulled thier products together?
Do you get a small amount of satisfaction when things go slightly awry? Just because it prooves they're not the perfect scrappers you sometimes imagine them to be :-)

Not that I put myself in that category of being anyone's favourite designer, but I thought I might do a post today showing you how I made this page work for me. It may or may not become a regular feature. We'll see. Tell me what you think at the end of the post.

So I started with my DT package from Handmade by Suzanne which was filled with some creamy vanilla cardstock, October Afternoon Modern Homemaker papers and some Webster's Pages lace which I made into flowers. And I was inspired to work with the sketch above designed by Valarie Salmon on the Pink Paislee blog. It was so quick to slap together this much on my page and call it almost done.

So it looks fine at this point, and for many a clean and graphic scrapper this would probably suffice (obviously it lacks a title and perhaps some journalling). But I just wasn't feeling it, and I had to walk away and leave it overnight before I could decide what to do.

The answer was fairly simple.... I had to make it more "me". I had to add some paint and ink and mess and emebellish it. There had to be no white space, and no clean lines!!
So I started with the first panal in the top right corner. I used my trusty homemade sunrays stencil and went to town with my yellow ink. Then I sewed some crazy messy stitches over the top and highlighted with some gold Stickles. Better. Much better.

The bottom left panal of paper got some Maya Mist treatment. I recently bought the Silver Plated one and I have to say this is my new favourite. What I especially love about these (compared to Glimmermists) is that they don't buckle and warp your paper nearly as much, and give such intense colours. It's hard to appreciate the shimmer in this photo (but wait until further on in this post!)

I added some pretty brads to the centre of my flowers, hand-stitched a stem and punched some leaves (which I also glittered!) to give these more detail too. Two little flowers to represent my two little girls :-)

More extra details - titles and subtitles (which were changed a few times, I should have taken photos of the before and after of that too... but I forgot), tags, border stickers, ribbon, journalling. And this is the end result. More my style don't you think, whilst remaining true to the original sketch.

Because I knew I was going to title this 'born to shine' in order to play along with the Bird is the Word "shine" challenge I knew I wanted to incorporate lots of shimmery, shiny, glittery accents. These pretty yellow and green alphas are both by Pink Paislee, and were just perfect.

Whilst the cream/red alphas are Jenni Bowlin, and I drew the 'shimmer' myself. I just bought myself a Silhouette machine and cannot wait for it to arrive - you'll see plenty more handcut titles on my pages then I can assure you! This is kind of like a practice run :-)

 

And this is the shot where I tried (still not quite successfully) to show you the shimmer and shine on this layout. Trust me - it looks real pretty :-)

So I would love to hear your thoughts. Tell it to me straight, I'm not afraid!