Her Majesty. Or should that be His Majesty?

Oh my goodness, I'm taking the most exciting online class at the moment at Stash to Treasure! It's by Bethany Kartchner called 'All About Me'. And whilst I don't have any plans to make an album all about me (which is what she's made) I am simply loving the mixed-media techniques she's teaching.

I put some of them into practice for this layout I made for the Get Picky Inspiration Challenge. Here's the inspiration piece so hopefully you can see where I was going with this!

Can you believe my background cardstock actually started off white! But once I added a million layers of impasto paste, gesso, acrylic paint, paper and Distress Inks you can no longer tell!

I really loved the pop of yellow alphas in the ad, and knew that was something I simply must add. Love the colour of these foam alphas by Pink Paislee.

And the lovely Sassafras Foldies reflected the pinks and reds and purples in the ad. Perfect!!

Can you read this funny conversation I had with Munchy a while ago? The punch line probably makes more sense if you know that we own a Buckingham Palace money box!

May You Stay

Paper: Jenni Bowlin Studios, Basic Grey Curio, Cosmo Cricket Togetherness, Sassafras Indie Girl.

Alphas: Cosmo Cricket. Embellishments: Sassafras Indie Girl banner stickers, Scenic Route chipboard, 

clear envelope, Jenni Bowlin journaling stickers, buttons, pearls. 

Other: Mister Huey 'Calico White', Maya Mist 'silver plated'

The song "Forever Young" by Bob Dylan has some really lovely lyrics don't you think?
Don't worry, I didn't really know them before now either. But they're the challenge prompt at Get Picky this month so they were all written out for me to be inspired by.

But instead of just taking one line of the song, or the title (which would have been easy too) I just decided the whole song would make beautiful journaling so copied it en masse onto my layout! The lyrics could easily have been written by a mum to her young child and talk about all her hopes and prayers for her future. At least that's how I've interpreted them for my layout :-) 

I titled my layout "Listen to my Heart", a bit like the Roxette song "Listen to your Heart" since I was in the zone of interpreting songs for my page. It fit perfectly because this really is my heart for my Little Moodles (and plus, it also fit the criteria for the challenge at Bird is the Word!!!)

I used my favourite white and silver mists to spray some subtle stars in the background. They really are a lot more subtle than this to look at straight-on, but I was trying to capture the shimmer for you here :-) This was in response to my favourite line in the song which says "May you build a ladder to the stars And climb on every rung"

Count Your Blessings

One of my other scrappy resolutions for this year (apart from using my stamps more which I've previously mentioned) is to do more layouts about my feelings/emotions/thoughts/letters to my children rather than just events etc.

These beautiful papers in the WonderFall collection by Webster's Pages prompted me to do that very thing by providing me with a ready-made title that I cut from one of the papers by the same name - Count Your Blessings.

So instead of just journaling about how and why these photos were taken (which wasn't that interesting really anyway!) I wrote a little letter to Munchy reminding her to take the time to realise how very blessed she is.

I used this photo from the current Get Picky challenge as my inspiration behind the colours and elements in my layout too. See all the lovely white flowers everywhere? The silver/almost blue tones? The touch of orange (the fire)? All that texture? That's what I used!

It's difficult to see but I did do a lot of stamping on the blue cardstock behind all my elements. It's just a script stamp, and the reason you can't see it very well is because I used my Frayed Burlap Distress Ink which has blended and faded quite nicely into the background.

I'm actually quite tickled that this butterfly is upside down. I think it adds a certain amount of whimsy! It's because I trimmed this border (the butterfly included) from the top of a different paper, but wanted to add it to the bottom of this one!

This super-girly layout also allowed me to use up lots of my other flowers, and because I was adding all that extra dimension, I felt I really needed to do something about the 'flatness' of the paper flowers. So I cut each petal individually and bent and propped them up with foam dots.

Do you want to know one of my recent blessings? The vast majority of supplies at Handmade by Suzanne are on sale at the moment. I've grabbed myself some bargains!! You could too!