Sunny Afternoons

Crate Paper have been having a collage week all this week showing some beautiful creations on their blog.  They also had a competition to do your own collage page taken from their inspiration and then tweet it.  I'd started this page but not quite finished it til last night (just before the light became to bad to take photos), set up a twitter account for myself which is @fruitofmyscraps and tweeted it to them.  I was delighted to wake up this morning and find I've won some paper :D

Here is a picture of my DS and one of his favourite friends who we go camping with, so here they are on a campsite field with a gym mat....they spent ages doing cartwheels, headstands and just messing around on it, and then did a little pose for this shot my DH took, I love the light in the shot and it is just one of those end of a sunny afternoon happy shots.

The papers I used for the page are Crate Paper's Farmhouse - still one of my favourites at the moment.  I started working on the collage block behind the photo, where I layered up several strips of paper and inked, ruffled and added some lines of zig zag and straight stitch....leaving the ends long to be piled under the buttons.  Once I knew the size of the main paper bit I then worked out where to put my grid and arrow stamp (American Crafts Chaps clear stamps) and inked them in aquamarine and poppy red from colorbox.  I used some blue memento ink for the circle stamp too, I also aded some images at the bottom of the page too.  I also added some flicks of shimmer mists, a nice peacock green and some firefly red.  Once all the inky bits had dried, I started to arrange it all.  My white doily didn't look right so I covered it in Spice Marmalade distress ink, just wiping the pad across the doily, and put some of the crate ruler sticker at the opposite corner.  I then added some chipboard pieces, both the banner and little circles into the ink splatters.  I piled up the thread ends under some buttons (if you look closely you can see the clear glue wasn't quite dry when I took the shots!.  Then finished it off with an Authentique mini alpha and some Echo Park For the Record alpha stickers too.

So I am off to where my big smile all day now :)