It Takes a Village

Last week I had the assignment to take a project from the My Mind’s Eye Pinterest Page and use it as inspiration to create my own project. I chose to work with THIS GORGEOUS PAGE by the talented Aphra Bolyer (Thanks, Aphra!). This was a little tricky for me, because Aphra’s page was pure perfection and I really just wanted to copy every little bit of it! 🙂 I pulled out the brand NEW On the Sunny Side collection, a few snapshots of my daughter at school, and sat down to give it a go.

I loved the way Aphra used smaller photos stacked on top of each other . . . almost like a filmstrip. So I did the same thing. These pictures are from a day my husband and I went to our daughter’s school to help the kids put together Mariottes. They are studying countries around the world and each student is making a Marionette puppet to represent the country they are writing a report on.

I used my Cricut Expression machine to help me out with my title and title block. The label shape was cut with the Cricut Craft Room Basics (the free cartridge you receive when you sign up to use Cricut Craft Room . . . also free!). That super cute font for the word “Village” is included on the Noah’s ABC Animals Cartridge. I used my Cuttlebug Machine and Swiss Dots embossing folder to add some fun texture to the letters. Instead of having the title block off to the left side, I moved it underneath my photos to give my pictures something to “sit” on. 🙂

Next, I wanted to add the cute houses to the bottom of my page. They all looked a little too uniform to me, so I added the three houses from the dimensional stickers to mix them up a bit. I also added some flowers from the chipboard elements, embellishing the centers of each one with stick-on gems.

I loved the way that Aphra used the banner pieces on her page and wanted to incorporate that into my page somehow. With the village of houses across the bottom, I just didn’t have room, so I used triangle banner pieces as part of the border separating the upper and lower halves of the page.

Finally, I added the place and date using Miss Caroline Dolled Up “Favorite” Stamps. This was such a fun page to put together! And now I have one more memory to include in my daughter’s school scrapbook. Thank you for inspiring me, Aphra! (Be sure to check out Aphra’s Blog if you haven’t. She makes the most amazing things!)