April 2023 - CKC Challenge #1 - Celebrate all the things!

 Over at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge you can find out all about our latest challenge set my MF Misty!

She was inspired by the birthday theme of the original kit and asked us 

to make a celebratory layout.

I haven't been feeling creative recently and have struggled to find the time or the motivation to really get scrapping so I gave myself a talking to and headed off to my weekly crop with my summer "Easygoing" kit in hand.

I decided just to go with the flow and see where the creative process took me without considering what layout I was really making. Just happy, sunny papers and techniques/design that make me happy.

I love the tag sheets that Simple Stories seem to have in every collection these days and started the whole process by cutting those up into individual tags and deciding that there were 5 really lovely ones I would like to use on my layout. Next up was a full sheet of floral clusters that I spent a happy half hour fussy-cutting up - I didn't keep any of the background, just cut out all the flowers!

So, I knew that I wanted to use tags and some flowers and now I headed into my tried and trusted design techniques!

The obligatory distressed, overlapping paper strips top and bottom of the page with a banner of tags along the middle where I intended to fit photos and journalling if possible.

I had the basic set up of my page within a few mins and then I tied those tags together which took me forever with the bows at the end! After that, it was just a matter of tucking in some fussy-cut flowers into the bottom paper strips. At this point, I was happy with my progress and decided it would be a celebration of friendship layout. 

We (my scrappy friends and I) have celebrated National Scrapabilly Day (the LSS run by our fearless leader Sylvia!) the last two summers and so, the summer photos and the theme of friendship and celebrations all came together. I knew all of this but the layout sat there waiting for a finish up for more than two weeks!

Today was that day and of course, the final touches of the photos, the journalling and some enamel dots took a very short time - why do I ALWAYS procrastinate so much?!? 

Overall, I'm very happy with how this all came together and turned out! 

Friends are always worth celebrating!

You can find out more about what the rest of the team created for this challenge over on the Counterfeit Kit Challenge blog and of course, in the CKC FB community here and over on IG here.

We'd love it if you created your very own celebratory layout and shared it with us - see you over there 😉