Our Tree – A Layout for the Supreme Scrap Tournament

Here goes nothing!!

I mentioned before that I’d signed up to participate in the Supreme Scrap Tournament along with 15 other super talented Canadians. Today our first challenges are due! I am in the Scrap Diva Tournament only and our challenge was to create a double page layout or double mixed media project that shows where we live – within 1000 steps from our home. We were not allowed to use any spray inks, we had to use at least 3 photos and we had to add visible journaling of at least 50 words.

Here’s what I came up with.

Our Tree by Alison Day – Challenge #1 for the Supreme Scrap Tournament

I love our neighbourhood (and our neighbours!) We are living in complete and total Suburbia!! When we bought this house back in 2007 one of the things I instantly fell in love with was the giant tree in our front yard. We asked the experts and found out it was called a Rayburn Ash and the entire subdivision had been planted with them. On our street only ours and the one on our neighbour’s property across the street remain. It’s a gorgeous tree with a huge canopy in the summer. Tradespeople all come and park their trucks under our tree for a shady lunch spot!! Seriously! It can be in the upper 30’s everywhere but in the shade of our tree. It’s awesome. In the Fall we rake up so many bags of leaves we lose count. Before those leaves go in the bags though they are used to create a pile big enough for all the neighbourhood children to jump in. And in the winter, on those rare snowy days that we get on the West Coast, it looks so beautiful draped in a snow blanket.

I went through my photos to find one that depicted our tree the best in each season. The snowy one was from this past December but the others are from past years. Another thing I love about our house is that we have a sidewalk in front. Makes for a safe place for our kids to ride their bikes in the good weather and the Spring photo shows Paige learning to ride on 2 wheels. In the summer the girls practically live on the front lawn. Picnics are had with friends. The sprinkler or Slip ‘n’ Slide is set up there regularly and the lawn under the tree is generally littered with bikes, bike helmets, toys, blankets, you name it! In the Fall, it’s all about the leaf pile. As they are getting older they are able to rake up the pile themselves! Yahoo!!

Okay, now for a little bit about the construction of the layout itself.

I chose 4 different papers that went well together while at the same time depicting the seasons through colour and/or pattern. I knew I wanted to have a little border of dark brown card stock so trimmed the papers accordingly. Then I chose a solid blue paper to mount my photos on and used a border punch to give the bottom edge some interest. The tree was something that I mulled over for several days. My Silhouette is all packed away at the moment so I decided to free hand draw and cut a tree shape instead. While going through my stash of Kraft coloured papers I found this corrugated cardstock and knew I’d found my tree!! I used the same dark brown ink that I’d used to edge all my papers to give it more interest and depth. Then I also added some white ink on the far left to represent the snow. I just used a small white ink pad and rubbed the tree in some places. Nothing fancy!

The leaves were die cut using a Big Shot die out of scraps from my scrap drawer. You know how I love using up those scraps!! Yesterday’s LOAD prompt was to dig into your stash so that’s just what I did when making this layout. The chipboard alphas I used for my title are so old I can’t remember when I bought them! I also didn’t have enough of just the green and blue letters to spell out my title so the addition of red meant I needed to dot it around the rest of my layout to bring some cohesiveness to it. While we do have a maple tree on the far side of our driveway, the maple leaves on the layout are more to represent the fact that we live in Canada than anything else.

Here’s a better shot of the tree. You can see how brushing the corrugated paper with dark brown ink adds so much depth to it! You can also see the white ink in this shot too. The red chipboard heart and the other red chipboard shapes (berries?? flowers??)  are from a really  old BoBunny Valentine’s Day collection.

Some of the leaves I adhered flat to the page, others are up on pop dots. This gives some interest to the scene.

The journaling starts above the ‘Summer’ photo and continues below it.

One last item to mention are the metallic hearts. Found in my stash while I was searching for red accents, they help reinforce the fact that I love our home and our neighbourhood. Plus they add a bit of shine to the layout.

Okay, that’s it. Time to upload this to the Tournament gallery. Voting is done by fellow participants and if I get enough votes I’ll go through to the next round so wish me luck! Hopefully this is not the last Supreme Scrap Tournament post you see from me!! Wish me luck!!

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