Inspired by... advertising

Happy Monday everyone!

It's a short week for me (Thursday is a Bank Holiday here in NRW) which makes the week even better.

I have to admit to not being a Monday person. I don't get this whole, "Monday's my favourite day of the week as it's a new start...." For me, it's just the beginning of what feels like a looooong time until the next weekend! Yes, I know, I'm working on the positive thinking thing... it takes time :-)

However, last week I had a lot of free time in the evenings and nothing on the TV to tempt me out of the room (it's summer - repeats and family stuff only), so I used my time creatively.

My June Counterfeit Kit Challenge kit, All A Flutter, has proved great and I've already created four layouts from it. To help us during the month, the Counterfeit team post mini-challenges for us along the way as well as tutorials and all sorts of inspiration (you really should check out the site if you haven't already - it's proving such a great resource) and the first mini-challenge was to use advertising for inspiration.

I've done this before and it's really a great place to find all sorts of ideas. Some of the design team went for the design itself, the wording, the colours, the feel of the ad and so on. I had a bit of a problem in that I don't buy or subscribe to any mags at the moment apart from CK and The Scrapbook Magazine and was finding it difficult to find something that jumped out at me. Then I found some old publications that need throwing out from literally years ago and flipped through to find this rather serious banking ad:

It may be a bit on the boring side but I liked the title off to the right and the full width photo so off I went and pulled out some photos of Maddie for this layout:

I have hundreds and hundreds of photos of my adorable nieces and nephew and sometimes I need to look beyond the photo itself to find a reason to scrap them. I could've made this into a "Maddie on her big girl bike page" and in fact, I have more like this so that might still come, but I love the fact that Maddie really is a *pick herself up* kind of girl and so this take on the pictures came to mind.

Everything came from my kit and I even found place for 15 (!) brads which can only be a good thing.

Thanks to visiting this yesterday evening...

... I wish you a song filled Monday. 

I woke up with "Take Me To The Pilot, which is a very old Elton track, going round my head. But pick your favourite today and see how it makes you smile! 

(Go on, he may be a bit on the uncool side, but I bet there's one track out there that you like!)