Scrap the Girls

I don’t think I've entered a layout for Scrap the Girls yet. I've looked at the challenges before but that's about as far as it's gotten! So, I decided to change that this month and made this layout with a photo of my mother-in-law and sister-in-law. It was taken at my father-in-law's recent 90th birthday party. My mother-in-law looks so happy and you can't tell in this picture that most of the time she's in a world of her own. It's so sad what dementia has done to her.

I'm really pleased with this layout! I love the colours and the final result. My only problem was I couldn't come up with a title, so for the first time my layout has no title, but I don't think it matters.

The challenge at Scrap the Girls was to scrap a picture (of a girl, obviously!) and use hexagons, buttons and paint/mists. These are not things that I use often (or ever in the case of the hexagons ☺), so it was a great challenge for me.

I started with a sketch by Beck Fleck from Page Maps from September 2011.

I had just bought a hexagon embossing folder (Stampin' Up!) so embossed a piece of black paper and then cut out a single row of hexagons from the embossed paper. I added a bit of gold paint with my finger and put them in place of the row of thumbnail photos in the sketch.

I added some gold paint to the flowers as well. The other paint I used was through a chicken wire template (The Crafter's Workshop ChickenwireTCW239). That ended up being hexagons too really.  

The black lace was left over from an LSS monthly kit and I added some gold ribbon too. I didn't have any ribbon wide enough to go over the end of the patterned paper on the right hand side and felt that it really needed something. But I happened to notice a pack of glitter paper in the mess that is my scrap room and realised that I could just die cut a border. I used the MFT Die-namics faux crochet border die (twice to make a full 12" border and covered the join up with the button).

I think with the exception of maybe one, all the buttons on this layout are from my mother-in-law's

stash! When we cleaned out my in-laws' house before her move to the nursing home I inherited about six jars full of buttons. Rather fitting I think that I used some of them on this layout considering it is about her. Those that had shanks on them I cut off. Unfortunately the shanks didn't exactly come off flush with the bottom of the button and so I attached them with some foam tape. Those with button holes I threaded with some gold ribbon/cord before adding them on to the page with double sided tape.

See the gold pen?!

I used a gold gel pen to add a few dots of gold on the patterned paper. You can see some in some of it in the close up photo. I also coloured the scalloped edge of the patterned paper, and the "pie quarter designs" in that paper too.

I made two swirls from some gold coloured wire, as well as adding the left over pieces of a black rhinestone swirl that a friend had given me (thanks Lainie). There are a few red rhinestones scattered about as well!

All in all, I'm very pleased with this layout and hope you like it too.

Till next time, happy days!

Francine