spring cleaning

As I mentioned in my last post, this week I am doing a bit of "spring cleaning" ie, finishing off some half-done pages that have been lying around.  Here is a page I think any mother of boys can probably relate to, "brothers can be friends, (can't they?).  It feels like they do nothing but fight, but then sometimes when you're out, this magical thing happens - they forget that they are mortal enemies and have a great time together! As I say in my journalling, hopefully we won't always need a north Queensland stream and 10x optical zoom to prove to them that they can be friends!

It's funny how some photos you grab and scrap straight away and others sit around for a lot longer.  This next lot of photos is from "graduation" day from a dog training course I did last year.  first they sat around because I realized I wanted to print out some of the trainer's photos, so I waited for them.  Then, I think the problem was I had too many photos.  Finally, I had a bit of a "eureka" moment, when I thought to myself, who said I only had to do one page!  So even though all the photos are from the one day, I divided them into a page about the training course itself and another about the graduation day.  Finally, they sat around waiting for me to do the journalling tags, which I finished tonight.
I linked the two layouts by using the same two dog-themed sheets of patterned paper (I think they might be from Max and Whiskers by Basic Grey) in the same way.  I used the striped paper as a photo mat on the left hand side (sewed around three sides to make a pocket for my journalling) and a pawprint strip on the right hand side to break up the photos. I cut out  framed dogs from the other sheet of paper to make cute embellishments and mounted them on foam mounting tape.

 For the background, I used cardstock in a similar tone of the same texture, and used the same rub-ons for the titles. 

The blue page about the graduation was the one I did first, so I had to get a bit more creative for the second one.  Here, you can see I didn't have one continuous strip of paper to use, so I used two different strips, and hid the gap later with a puppy embellishment.

 Unfortunately, the framed pictures on the patterned paper overlapped quite a bit, so when it came to using this big picture, I really had to get creative!  I'm pretty pleased with the finished result - if you don't look too close, you can hardly even tell!