Celebrate Spring!

I love the colours of this latest layout which I made for the Frosted Designs Sketch and doily challenge. A friend from new Zealand sent me the large red doilies with our last ATC swap so it was great to be able to use them.

Usually I stick pretty closely to a sketch but I wasn't a big fan of the banners - I know it's all the rage now, but they're not really my thing and I rarely use them on a layout. So, I missed them out, but used most of the other elements.

These photos are of the white climatis and intertwining jasmine vine buds which take over our side fence in spring. It's a beautiful sight! I just had to capture them on "film". I'm glad I could scrapbook them for this challenge.

The layout was fairly straightforward. I cut out some doilies from paper scraps I had in my stash using the Die-namics Decorative Doily and Cheery Lynn English Tea Party doily dies. The butterflies were cut/embossed with the Stampin' Up! Beautiful Wings Embosslits die, and the leaves were cut with the Stampin' Up! Little Leaves Sizzlet die.

 

I contemplated for some time over what to do with the background - it was too plain, but I didn't want to add any more papers or embellishments. I settled on some stamping and used my (new to me) Stampin' Up! French Foliage stamps to randomly stamp the French script and ink splatter stamps in red and yellow. I think that filled in the space very well.

Finally I used some letter stickers for the title. I had wanted to stamp it too with the word celebrate in Ali Edwards type script stamped over top of some large alphabet stamps for the word spring, but none of my meagre supply of alphabet stamps would work, so I went stickers instead. While it's not the look I had hoped for, I actually think it worked better because I would have had to put the stamped title on the background cardstock so it would show up, and then it would have been too high on the page. So, ultimately it was a good result.

All in all, I'm quite pleased with this layout - not my favourite, but definitely not my worst! What do you think?

Till next time, happy days.