Botanicals & Butterflies! & Awesome Webster's Pages!!

This will be my last post for My Creative Scrapbook kit club, I made the decision last month to step down from the DT and make a few changes.  It was such a hard decsion to make as I've been designing for MCS for exactly 3 years now.  I've grown so close to the girls on the design team and gotten to know so many wonderful people through this experience.  Happily I know I will keep in touch with the dear friends I've made through my blog, galleries and other design teams.  Thank you to all my dear friends for their kind words and support, they've meant a lot to me.

So, moving on, I have to say it was nice to go out working with some of my favourite things, botanicals and butterflies!!  I just love Pink Paislee's Butterfly Garden collection!  The photo above is one I took of my two girls when we were out on a walk a few weeks ago.  We've been having strange weather but this was one of those balmy lovely days just cast into the middle of a whole lotta rainy miserable days.  I love the butterflies that coordinate with this collection...the transparent layer over the butterfly image is so beautiful in real life.  Here are a few close-up pic's of this layout....

  I often hear people say how much they like my photo's and how cooperative my girls are about having their photo's taken.  But I  always say...I take a ton of pic's to get the ones I actually use.  Below is a l/o I made to give you a little more accurate idea of how things go when I'm trying to get pic's of my girls.....

This was the next shot I got  after the one I scrapped above lol!  Hence the title 'Real' Sisters. Ah well, they still make me laugh with their silly antics and aside from the odd spat or two they do get along pretty well.  I used the Webster's Pages Ladies & Gents collection for this one.  This is such a versatile paper collection because it allows for both masculine and feminine style pages.  For the little dress forms in the corner I gathered some sheer ribbons to make the skirts and painted the dress forms white.  I inked the edges of the dress forms with some brown chalk ink and then put some Stardust Stickles over it to give them some shimmer & shine. The vine I made from some of the loose stemmed blooms, you can find a little demonstration I made up on how to make your own vines HERE.   Here is a close-up pic....

Another photo I took on our outing together was this one below of my oldest daughter Chloe.  I used the Prima papers (Botanicals collection) mixed with some more of the Pink Paislee Butterfly Garden collection to compliment the soft floral top she was wearing in the photo.

It's been a while since I've done the corset lacing design on my layouts (a couple years ago, I used the corset lacing on so many of my l/o's, funny how you move on to different things for a while and then pull out a favourite again!)  Although I used a ribbon for my corset lacing, I recommend you use something a little less thick, like string, cording, something finer as trying to get the thick ribbon through the eyelets is not so easy!  The button I used in the center of the brown bloom was in the kit, but the center was missing....I guess it had popped out?  So I created my own 'jewel' for it by adding a couple of layers of blue 'Waterfall' Stickles, let it dry and then added a nice mound of Tim Holtz Glossy Accents.  The finished effect is almost like an opal!  Here are some close-ups of the above page....

The frayed bit beside the large bloom is sort of an accident thing lol!....I was fiddling with one of the trims in the kit and it just started unraveling on me before I could tape off the end.  So I chopped off the ravelled bit and just stuck it on the page....almost like a little bit of nest :)

I really love the pretty botanical design in the PP paper below;  The frame around the photo is made from a sheet of lace paper by BasicGrey layered over some simple pink cardstock.  The edging around the photo was made with another style of decorative scissors and a white gel pen (Signo Unibal)

The tiny white/yellow blooms were made using the EK Success retro flower punch in the mini size.  I just inked the centers with some yellow chalk ink and added a liquid pearl drop in the center. Here are a couple of close-up shots of the above page...

And finally the last page I made was of me and my girls, my dear husband took this photo of the 3 of us while we were out on our little beach/forest walk.  I used more of the beautiful Ladies & Gents collection to make up this page.....

The lolipop blooms on this page of course are the Websters Pages Pincess Petals (LOVE these!) and the soft pink blooms are ones I again made using recycled dryer sheets (see some tutorial instructions in the rightside column of my blog)...

If I've missed explaining anything I did on these layouts or if you have any product questions don't be shy to ask I'm always happy to answer any questions! :)   ....thanks for stopping by again, I'm always happy to hear from my friends here!

~Gabrielle xx