Busy, Busy, Busy

It has been a busy couple of months in the Swift household. What with getting ready for the baby, being put on bedrest then induced, and then taking care of my sweet little baby girl. It didn't leave me much time to do any crafts the past couple of months- in fact this blog pretty much leaves off at my last project of the DC album (which still remains unfinished- hopefully I will complete it before I forget all about the trip- EKK!).

Lately though my DD has been going through what I can only guess is a growth spurt, and therefore sleeping ALOT during the day, leaving me sometime to get a couple of scrapbook pages done. So I have some new material to share with you :)

The layout for this page is not my own, but was inspired by a post on Splitcoaststampers by MkMiracleMakers. Just wanted to make sure I gave credit where credit was due :)

I've got two tricks for you that I used on this page. First, the striped rust color paper was to stark for me- I wanted softer stripes so that the colors were closer together. In order to achieve this I filled two rectangular punches- one with the Cajan Craze color fill and the other with the matching striped paper. I layered the striped paper over the solid color and then decreased the opacity of it in order to let more of the lower layer show through, thus decreasing the vividness of the stripes. I love the softer look it produced and the darker overall color.

My second trick was "coloring in" the flower in the lower right hand corner. The stamped flower just didn't look right on the DSP- it was much to hard to see. So I "colored" it by placing punched shapes behind the stamp to fill in the area. For this particular stamp I found that a carefully sized oval fit nicely behind each of the petals, and then a circle covered what was remaining in the middle. Then I added some pizzaz by placing a punched flower (with a border) on top in a contrasting color and finished it off with a coordinating flower brad!

Hope you like how this page turned out. By the way, the font is my new favorite "Ali's Hand" which is a free download from the CreatingKeepsakes webpage. If you like to have a good library of fonts to pick from you should visit them often- they have a free font friday download! Some of the christmas fonts recently were pretty cute- the one even looked like candycanes!