BBTB2 Challenge - Friends

Hi all!

I hope everyone has been enjoying the long weekend.  Last week at work was quite crazy so I needed the break.  I have spent most of this weekend with 2 of my grandbabies who stayed the night so mom and dad could attend a wedding.

A new challenge kicks off today over on the Bitten By the Bug 2 blog - friends.  As soon as I saw it I knew just the pictures I wanted to scrap.

These are random pics I took of Hollyn and some of her closest (and longest) friends that I had taken over the past year - no special event just everyday life but these kids!  The group on the trampoline have all known each other since birth.  The others have been friends since kindergarten.  How special is that?  And how lucky are we to have been able to stay in our one house in our small town for so long so she can develop these long-time connections?  It just so happens that I love these parents tremendously and am so grateful for the "Village" they create.

I used quite a few cartridges creating the layout I envisioned in my mind.  The title was a bit tricky.  My only real complaint about Cricut and Design Space is the lack of a shadow feature like Make the Cut software has.  But I managed to pull it off anyway for this one.  The font is Cricut Alphabet - Regular, the hearts are from Birthday Cakes and the flowers are from Mother's Day Bouquet.  The font and hearts all had a shadow layer so I moved everything close together so the top layer of the letters was touching, welded that, then moved the hearts in and selected all of the shadows for the letters and hearts and welded those - ta da!

I REALLY wanted to create this cluster - I love the look of these but have little experience pulling them off.  I am QUITE pleased with the way this one turned out!  I used quite a few cartridges searching for just the right items - Mother's Day Bouquet, Birthday Cakes, Anna's Elegant Embellishments, Bits and Pieces, & Garden Soup.  Once it was put together I sprinkled it with a bunch of self-adhesive pearls & rhinestones I have had laying around FOREVER (used them around the title piece too).  I really had a lot of fun playing with the different flower bits on the Mother's Day Bouquet cartridge - I had forgotten about them.  A little quirk in Design Space - when I type flowers (with an S) in the search box they don't come up.  When I type it without the S they do.

Repeated the hearts, flowers and embellishments along the bottom for fun.

Now what can YOU create with your Cricut using Friends as your theme?  Hop on over to the BBTB2 blog, check out the other projects from the Design Team and then link up a project of your own!

I was inspired by the following other challenges:

• Fussy & Fancy - flowers
• Double D Challenges - Flowers Galore