This is Life

Good Evening!!

I was just looking out my window and thinking how thankful I am to have a warm house to live in. It is rather windy, cold and generally blustery outside today! Atleast we have yet to receive the predicted snow that was to come today! Maybe we will get lucky and it will bi-pass us!!

But today seemed like a good day to just sit indoors and do a little crafting! How can I complain about the weather when it gives me an excellent excuse to do what I love to do!

Scrapbook!!!

But before I drag out my "stuff" and reek total havoc upon my kitchen table (hehe!!!), I wanted to share with you a project I just finished working on!

This layout is a picture of my grandpa (who is the the young boy standing in the back row next to the tall girl in white) surrounded by other unknown family members. With this picture I knew I wanted the layout to be a pretty simple page. I wanted to portray the way of life that my grandpa had growing up, where there was no computers, no cell phones and no gaming consoles!!! When spending time with family really mattered and fresh air was a way of life!

I used a Kaiser Craft wooden embellishment, broken apart so I could place it in several spots on the layout. These wood shapes are a great embellishment that can be inked, painted or sprayed with your fave glimmer sprays. I chose to leave my wood raw for this page, to give it a more natural look.

I also used some MME burlap trim and by using my black paint dabber I was able to give it a dirty kinda look. I also used a Tim Holtz mask to create the barbwire on the background. I love this mask. It comes with several types of borders and you can create the negative or positive of the border. When I use masks or stencils, I like to use the Ranger Inkessentials blending tool and foam pads with distress ink. I like the control it gives me to be able to ink exactly where I want to ink and I can give it a nice soft look or darken it easily. The Distress inks are also my favorite inks. They have great colors and work perfectly for distressing. There are some great YouTube videos on how to use these inks. Another great tool is the Tsukineko Sponge Dabbers. These little dabbers fit right onto your finger like a thimble and are great for even more control when inking stencils or masks.

 I then stamped a simple little quote from a Technique Tuesday stamp set I have (one of my fave sets by the way!!) and a leafy border stamp on a little of the edges. To finish off the layout I did a free-hand black border using a fine-tip black sharpie pen and inked the edges with a black paint dabber.

Thanks for stopping by! Enjoy the rest of your weekend!!