Wanted - a smile; Life is Good!

 

This is one of my favourites! I just love those photos and the LO came together so easily with my OA 'Sassparilla' papers. Benji got the cowboy hat at the school fair last weekend. he was thrilled with it so I was really surprised that he refused to smile for a photo later in the day. Well a few hours later we knew why. the poor little guy was coming down with a very nasty tummy bug and spent the next 24 hours vomiting :( Still those photos were too cute to leave unscrapped!
I used a tecnique that I saw on Georgia Heald's blog to distress my background. Basically I coated my base paper with modge podge. I then tore about an inch all around the edges of my background paper and  sprayed it with water to make it easier to manipulate. I distressed the paper edges then adhered it onto the mod-podge coated base paper scrunching and creasing the paper as I went along. After it had dried completely I dry brushed white gesso around the periphery of the page making sure to cover the join between the base and background papers.
Then came the fun part - layering my papers and embellishments. I used the co-ordinating stickers from my Sassparilla collection and Scrapware chipboard. I wanted my mini alphas to match the page exactly and the pre-made ones that I have did not, so I stamped part of my title onto a scrap of Sassparilla paper and cut out the individual letters to mimic mini-alphas. Because I wanted to enter this into the 'Scrap the Boys' challenge this month I had to use 'Life is Good' as part of the title so I made a humerous title using the 'Wanted' stickers from the OA papers. To finish I dry brushed a little more white gesso over my embellishments and stickers to pull the page together.