New Projects to Share!

A few weeks ago, I brought Nolan and Ailis down to Vancouver for a little summer holiday.  Despite a couple minor hiccups, we had a fabulous time, much better than I'd anticipated!  I had them each pick one thing that they really wanted to do.  Ailis chose Playland, and Nolan chose the Aquarium, and of course, I was a snap-happy momma!

I was pretty excited to get a layout done of some of our trip photos, so when I saw this sketch from Sketch N Scrap:

 I pulled out two photos from the Vancouver Aquarium and set to work with my July Counterfeit Kit.  Here's what I ended up with:

  

The glare on the photos is actually from the flash reflecting off the plastic dome the kids had stuck their heads up into.  They're so goofy, they make me laugh!

At first I wasn't too keen on how this layout was turning out - the colours were too predictable, and there wasn't anything special about it.  That's where the texture paste came into play, which I spread through a stencil and then brushed some Lindy's Stamp Gang spray over top.  (My bottle is plugged up, but painting it on worked well in this case!)  I inked most of the edges, too, which I haven't done in a loooooong time, but it seems to add some dimension, so I'm happy now with the final product.

Here's a couple of close-up shots, one of the banner in the upper right:

and another of the journaling:

Which brings me to my second project to share - a birthday card for my 13 year old baby boy!  I don't even know how this happened, how is Nolan now a teenager?  I'm freaking out a bit here!  

Anyway, I wanted to make my boy a card, and I knew I wanted to use one of my new CTMH stamp sets, so I looked around for a suitable sketch, and I found one at Freshly Made Sketches, a new-to-me site:

And here's what I came up with: 

I really love how this one turned out, so much that I might have to duplicate it again soon!  As for Nolan, I think I may have gotten a grunt in response to this card, but that's about all I expected - he is a teenager, after all!  And I did miss the deadline to get this card submitted, but that is also nothing new!

So that's it from me for today - thank you for stopping by to take a look.  We hosted a BBQ here on Friday night, and it forced me to clean up ALL my scrapbooking clutter, so now I have an absolutely fresh counter to mess up.  Now I just have to decide on a project to work on...