Happy Canada Day!

Canada is 147 years old today. I am so proud to be a Canadian. I may have been born in the UK (and proud of that too!!) but coming to Canada was such a good decision. A few years ago I participated in a Blog Hop of fellow crafty Canadians and I wrote about my feelings on being Canadian. You can read all about it here.

To celebrate today I thought I’d share a layout I recently had published in the Summer issue of Canadian Scrapbooker Magazine.

This is my youngest at the bike parade our Elementary school holds annually before Sports Day. The theme was Canada (obviously) so I bought out the dollar store of all their red and white Canada Day accessories. (My older two daughters also decorated their bikes but as they were riding with their classes and Christine was with me all day, I didn’t get such great shots of them. Plus, who could resist taking a ton of photos of her cute little grin?!)

The white card stock and red patterned paper were from my regular stash but pretty much everything else was from past Gossamer Blue kits. It feels so good to use up those left overs. Each month I can usually get through most of the papers in the kit but there are always embellishments remaining that I’m happy to use on other projects. Doesn’t do anyone any good just sitting in a drawer, right?

Here you see one of the embellishment groupings I made with those leftovers. One of my go to designs for my layouts these days is an L shape. It may not be super obvious in this layout but the photo grouping creates the base of the L while this cluster up at the top left of the page is the vertical stroke of the L. At least, that’s what your eye will think! Having this little extension actually helps keep your eye focused on the main grouping and the photos. One of those ‘strange but true’ design principles. 🙂

I knew what I wanted my title to be but I also knew white letters wouldn’t show up so well against the white doily and papers so I chose grey instead. Using a mix if colours and fonts give the title interest. If you look closely you’ll also see one of my letter “fixes”. I didn’t have a U left in this pack so I cut down a Q. If I hadn’t told you, would you have known?

For the purposes of the magazine publication I didn’t put a ton of journaling on this layout. I may go back to add more as I still have space on this tag. But if I never get around to it, that’s okay too! The main particulars are there already.

To stretch my supplies a bit I employed a trick I have seem Shimelle Lain do many a time. I cut some elements in half so I could use them in two places. The doily for example and also that bit of fussy cut patterned paper behind it. The chalk board stickers on this layout are also both leftover halves from previous projects.

With that I will wish you all a Happy Canada Day! Hope you get to enjoy the day off with friends and family. I have to work for a bit today (yay, time and a half pay!!) but plan to hang out with the girls later. It’s supposed to be a hot one so I’m thinking a BBQ may be in order! How will you be celebrating? Leave a note in the comments or come on over to my Facebook page and let me know there. Can’t wait to hear from you!

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