Lazy Days of Summer

Frosted Designs had a sketch challenge a while ago that I never got to do, but I had the photos in mind when I saw the sketch. I finally got a chance to make this layout and am very pleased with the result.

I'm really trying not to buy any more paper and use up my stash. I have a huge amount of TLC kits and papers from when I was selling it. While they're not the most up to date designs anymore, I think that I've learned lots of techniques since then and can make them work with the current trends. So, I used the papers and some of the elements from the TLC Sun Seekers kit (© 2004, so 8 years old!).

I started out by making the background. I made a sun using MS Word, printed it on an A4 sheet of paper and cut it out. Then I placed it on my cardstock and inked around the edges. It was a bit lacklustre, so using my Sew Easy tool, I pricked the holes to sew around the points of the sun with floss. Ah, much better!

I had already trimmed my photos when I decided to use one of the frames from the kit. It was too small for the large photo, but too big for the small ones. But, with the blue patterned paper showing through below and above the picture, it still looked good. There were three eyelets in the frame already, so I just made them dimensional by putting actual eyelets over the spot where they were drawn on.

I attached the patterned paper and photos and then came the fun part! I went through my ribbon, sticker and yellow embellishment stashes and found some cool stuff! The chipboard stickers (yellow "Summer spending time together" and blue "Ocean Summer") were from a Jasart Made 4u set I got free with some purchase I made once. I added a yellow gingham ribbon bow (made with this fabulous tutorial) to the top tag. I found fish brads, smiley face button (which I cut the shank off of), star brad, mirror, round brads and flat eyelets (not sure of the correct term, LOL!) in my yellow container. The stickers (fun, lazy days of summer) button sun (which I cut out and added a real button to), and pointy sun (I had two, cut one out and used mounting tape to pop it up on the bottom one) all came from the TLC kit. 

I die cut the mini suns (8 times) from the patterned papers using the MFT Die-namics Notched Tag die. I set the button sun on two papers die cut with the MFT Die-namics Layered Label die. The flags and posts I cut with the MFT Die-namics Mini Pennant die. I cut the flags out on the fold so that I could more easily glue them onto the jute (a leftover from a clothing tag). I made the posts different lengths and I think they really look like posts set into the sand. I realised later that I probably could have die cut the little bird from the notched tag die and drawn some feet to make a couple of seagulls, but now I'm finished, I don't feel like adding anything else.

So, what do you think? I don't often scrap with yellow (even though it's my favourite colour), so it was fun and I think this layout was very summery and not really dated despite the mostly old supplies that I was using.

Till next time, happy days.

Francine