Guess How Much We Love You

Hello and welcome back to my blog! It's February already, and this month at Stick It Down we had this fantastic sketch to work with:

I don't usually do Valentine's layouts, but this year I decided to celebrate Valentine's Day by creating this double page. It tells the story of our cat, who has been a part of our family as long as the kids can remember...

I decided to do some stash busting, making some room for the new collections. I included lots of random photos from throughout the years, all sorts of colours and different tones, so I wanted to keep the background and the embellishment toned down. I used white card stock for the background, then layered a peach patterned paper from an older Maggie Holmes collection and a blue Dear Lizzy patterned paper on top. I repeated these two colours in the embellishments, as well, adding black, bright pink and bits of red to it.

For the embellishments I used mostly Maggie Holmes and Crate Paper. The butterflies and puffy hearts are from Pinkfresh Studio. I usually find it difficult to include birds, butterflies, hot air balloons, and other airborne things on my layouts, but my cat loves chasing anything flying through the air, so it made sense to include the butterflies.

I finished the layout with the title and some Colorshine. I knew I wanted to include the puffy phrase as part of the title, and it fitted perfectly at the bottom of the wreath-like embellishment cluster. I struggled to find suitable alpha for the rest of the title, one that is suitable in colour and size. Eventually I settled on this white foam alpha from American Crafts.

I know that my fussy cutting is so imperfect, and some of those ink droplets came out a bit dodgy, but I thought I might as well include close-ups, anyways...