HOLY COW - I WON!!!

I just got a message that I won the summer-long contest that was being run by Two Scrapbook Friends!!!!

I'm totally shocked to be honest. It's been an amazing contest and pushed me to try new things and new colours, embellishments, styles and subjects I might not have otherwise done.

So many other people in the contest did such incredible work as well. It was fun seeing the new challenges being posted each week, and it was also amazing to see the incredible range of beautiful layouts that the other participants produced.

When I entered it, I had no idea what the prize was going to be... and I didn't really do the contest to win the prize (partly because I wanted to do it for the experience, and also because I really thought I'd be voted out pretty early on lol).

The prize I won is:

- a Guest Designer spot on the store's Design Team in an upcoming month
- a 50.00 gift certificate from Two Scrapbook Friends to be used in the store
- and a free pizza crop for me and 17 of my friends....

I'm so excited!!!

Given it's after midnight, should I go wake up Chris to tell him?

Scrappers Island - Final Layout

Tomorrow is the finale of Scrappers Island - the Two Scrapbook Friends contest I've been participating in all summer. It's down to myself and two other amazing scrapbookers - and I think they're announcing the winner on Thursday.

For the final week, we had to submit one layout that met the following requirements:

- must use bling
- must have a title on the layout
- must have journaling on the layout
- must use embellishments
- must use distress ink
- must use an edge distresser

Here's the layout I did for the contest:



As part of this challenge was to include journaling, I decided to focus a lot on the journaling - even though it’s essentially hidden journaling. I put it on a cardstock behind a little pocket I made for two reasons.
1. The journaling was long enough that it would have taken over the layout, so by putting it behind the pocket, it didn’t overwhelm the page.
2. The subject of the journaling and layout is somewhat personal and emotional, so I liked the idea of having it ‘hidden’ so not everyone would read it if they looked through my book but it would also be easy to pull out if someone wanted to read it.

Here's a picture showing the journalling tag that was hidden in the pocket.



For this layout, I used some pretty papers from Heidi Grace Designs (Marina Drive) and some card stock from various companies.

For the title, I used some metal letters, rub-ons and a chipboard heart/swirl. Using my computer and printer, I modified the word “HEART” to fit within the heart cutout of the chipboard. The chipboard heart/swirl was inked with dewdrop inks and then I covered it with Distress Stickles in Vintage Photo.

Flowers were from various sources (Prima, etc.). Swirl bling is from Prima’s Say It in Studs collection. Rub-ons are by Daisy Bucket and buttons are from Basic Grey. I added stickles in Copper and Vintage Photo to the flowers as well.



I inked all of the edges of paper and cardstock, and used my edge distressor on the brown cardstock I used for the photo mat.

The photo is one of my son from when he was 8 months old - I’ve wanted to use on a layout for a while, but just couldn’t find the right type of page to do with this photo.