My new favorite layout.

Let's be honest. I don't always like what I make. I should - I mean, if you're going to go to the trouble of making something, you ought to love it, right? But, no, sometimes I'm crafting just for obligation sake.

But not this time. This time, though this was for a specific challenge, I used product that I loved, photos that I love, and I even mixed things up with a little bit of digital play.

The background is a piece of Crate Paper from one of my noelmignon.com kits (I can't remember which one, of course) that I punched with a Martha Stewart edge/corner punch. Then I dripped a little white ink onto the page just to give it a little more aged look.



All of the paper on the page is by Simple Stories - the 100 Days of Summer line. AND I AM IN LOVE WITH IT. Period. The end. My favorite line. At least for the next few days, until I've used it to death and am sick of it.



And then I grabbed one of the little wooded fences and inked it up. LOVE this simple little technique - and it works so well with this kind of paper.



It is at this point that I must confess that I made this page up with absolutely no idea of the photos that would be going on it. So, when I got to the point that I HAD to add photos to it, I realized that my printer was completely out of ink and I was, in fact, screwed. It is at this point that I must also confess to being in a sadly embarrassing state of general appearance and that no amount of money could have made me do anything about it in order to leave the house, drive the 12 miles to Staples and get ink.

So I improvised.

I photographed the layout, uploaded it to Photoshop (I use CS3) and put my photos into the layout. I just traced around the summer banner and made it a new layer via copy, and put it over the photo so that it looked like I actually had a photo under the banner "for reals." And not for fakes. Fakes are bad.

Then I typed in a bit of journaling and voila!



It was actually kind of a nice change of pace, this little hybrid venture of mine, and I love the outcome!

So that's it for me today!
Happy scrappin'!