Mini-Me!

So many people comment on how alike my granddaughter and I are... maybe it's because she loves to mimic me? My daughter Katie took this photograph of her daughter and me and we just couldn't help ourselves...

I used the TeaHouse Collection again - but chose papers without cupcakes on this time. The green paper is the leftover from a previous layout (Cupcakes Are NOT For Sharing) and all the other papers used were scraps too - I'm trying to be thrifty *lol* The title is made with "Bang! Zoom!" sizzix die cut lettering, and the tiny flower brads for the centres of the paper flowers were a crafty bargain kept in my stash drawer. I used some X-Cut punches to make the little flowers - but they had to be plain and quite flat to fit in with this layout, so once again I didn't use the flowers I had made over the past few days!

The birds and the birdhouse are stamps from the Papermania "Tweet" 5"x7" clear stamp set (PMA 9074003) - I stamped them onto scraps of the TeaHouse papers with a Prussian Blue ink and just cut them out. One bird is stuck flat, whilst the other is stuck down using foam squares. The birdhouse is also stuck down using the foam squares... and if you look closely, you'll see that the birdhouse door opens up (not that it does much good - it was just a detail I wanted to add).

This layout used so much embroidery thread! I sewed around the aperture on the top layer of cardstock... and then just went mad with pale blue, green, pink and also a darker pink. I did all the stitching first... and then covered a lot of it with the embellishments! The bunting is cut out of scraps, and sewn onto the layout with embroidery thread. I also inked the edges of each bunting flag with the prussian blue ink to make it match in with the rest of the layout, and also to make it stand out a bit more. A blue pen was used to trace around the title lettering to make that stand out too. That's about it... I guess I did go overboard with the stitching details... but it was fun seeing how many different stitches and techniques I could use. I'll always love doing the shabby-chic flowery layouts... but sometimes it just doesn't fit the photograph I want to use - so I'm quite getting used to this 'new' style for me - and it does fit in nicely next to the 'normal' style I use when in the same scrapbook.