Best Gifts

Here is my layout for How Much Is Too Much challenge #183 (Gifts). This week our guest designer came up with the challenge, and Amy challenged us to scrap about gifts (either actual gifts or blessings in your life), and to

- Frame your page with an edge of background paper, a doodled/stitched border or a frame
- Use at least one stamp/digital brush/rub-on
- 3 ribbons/strings
- 6 circles
- 8 brads or buttons
- 10 flowers
- 2 elements that bleed off the page
- 4 crocheted or felt accents

Check out what the team did on the blog. I hope you will play along with us! Here's my layout:

When I looked through a pile of photos, I came across these two photos of handmade gifts from my sisters, three trolls and a musician made from bottle caps. These are some of my most special gifts and I am happy to have done a layout about them. The photos are a bit dark though, and I might have made a mistake when I picked the bottle green cardstock as background, which is not what I normally would have used. The layout was framed with machine stitching and I used a whole bunch of stamps. Six different circle stamps were used to stamp a tone-on-tone background. I ended up using more than six circles, because it looked a bit empty with just six. Two of the circles bleed off the page. Eight green buttons were stitched randomly on the background. The three strings were braided and stapled to the page. I didn’t want to include big flowers on this page, so instead I used a small flower stamp and stamped it ten times on the patterned paper. I used two felt arrows and die cut a heart and a swirl from felt.

The three light bulbs were stamped on shrink plastic with Stazon ink, and I also stamped my sisters’ names and a star on each one. Shrink plastic is so much fun, it is like magic to see the pieces shrink. I especially like how tiny the names came out.

Thank you for visiting my blog!

Supplies: Artistic Stamper light bulbs; Hero Arts: Big Clock CG166, Many Dots CL519, Thoughtful Messages CL184, Home Sweet Home ST513, Basic Lowercase Letters LL188; Technique Tuesday circles; 7Gypsies circles; Tim Holtz, BasicGrey and Life Stories patterned paper; Ranger shrink plastic; Versafine green ink; Stazon Jet Black; Tim Holtz Sizzix heart and flourish die; BG letter stickers; American Crafts felt arrows; felt; twine; buttons.