Birthday Layout

Hi all!

We are on Spring Break over here this week.  And so begins the tug of war with Pezza over how much time she will be able to spend on the computer and how much time she will spend being forced into activities that will develop her brain appropriately :P  I DID get her to spend some time in the studio painting with me yesterday and she made a great background.  She always makes great backgrounds but then she doesn't want to develop them into anything because she doesn't want to cover up the background.  But at least she's painting!

Today I have a 2 page layout to show you:

This is Pezza's 5th birthday party.  I really had fun with this layout.  I was chatting about papercrafting with my buddy Amy (the amazing talent of Pickled Paper Designs) and we were talking about how I had quit making cards and gone back to scrapping because I just did not feel like cards were a useful endeavor for me.

She was saying she has thought about going back to scrapping but after the small size and instant gratification of card making the large pages would be intimidating and I agreed.

But then I told her I had been getting really interested in the grid style of project life type layouts but instead of buying all the little card sets I could make my own and she had thought the same thing so I finally got around to doing that for this layout and I LOVED it!  SO fun!

It started with this little piece and Splitcoast Stampers.  This month has a fifth week and I am the Hostess for the 5th Week Scrapbook Challenge and my challenge is to use one of the card challenges from the month and incorporate it into a layout.  This is last week's SCS card sketch.  Everything was designed and cut with my Cricut Explore - Oh how I love doing it that way!  I know others have been doing it since the Gypsy but I guess I am slow to adapt new ways :P

I even got to color!  Pezza chose this little stamp - I pulled out a variety of cupcake stamps and of course the kitty stamp won!  I have had it forever and have no clue where it came from.  I colored it with colored pencil (I love colored pencils and gave up my Copics ages ago but boy those new Chameleon Markers sure do tempt me....)  The "icing" is Liquid Pearls and the "sprinkles" are micro beads - love me some micro beads!  I Stickled the "5th" cut and put it all together.

I even remembered to get out my embossing folders!

Another great thing about doing it this way - 6 x 6 paper pads can be used instead of needing the full 12 x 12 sheets of paper when trying to design the entire page....

These papers came from Doodlebug Designs Sugar Shoppe collection.  The stamped border is a little Studio G $1 stamp, also colored with colored pencils.

Her party request that year was rainbows and gold & silver stars so I wanted to be sure to get some gold & silver stars on the layout.  Rather than trying to dig up some gold & silver paper (which I am sure I have SOMEwhere) I just cut them from white paper and then sponged on Emperor's Gold & Silver Bells Silks Acrylic Glaze.  Perfect!

I also included lots of my glittered skittles I created back when I had my store - I still love them as the perfect little finishing touches!

Finally, the little tiny squares I alternated with bits of leftover patterned papers and tiny stamped images.  I have ALOT of different ink pads but my go to ones are the little Tsukineko Dew Drops - hands down my favorite ink pads for so many reasons.  In this particular case the tiny pointed shape makes it super easy to ink up your stamps with multiple colors.

SO what do y'all think?  Have you tried this?  I do hope you will all come join the challenge on Splitcoast Stampers - it's a great site if you don't already frequent it!  I am behind (WAY behind) on some sewing projects so I may not get anymore scrapping done in April but I plan to do more layouts like this, especially when there are a lot of pictures.