Life is Good in the 18th Century

 Hello and welcome to a special edition of my blog. This month I'll be serving as a Guest Designer for Lasting Memories. That blog posts a weekly challenge and then encourages others to play along with drawings at the end of each month. This month's challenges are all Title challenges. This week the challenge was to use the phrase "Life is Good".

I looked through my photos and decided that I would focus on a living history display at Moore's Creek Battlefield, NC. I had stopped here during a 2016 beach trip with Jim's family and enjoyed spending the day looking at the way people dressed, cooked, worked and lived. Many more pages to be added later!

Once I figured out the last half of the title and chose the photos, my next step was the arrangement. I found the journal box. It's from the CM Enchanted line (quite a few years old). I liked the way it had a feel of nature as well as a touch of red to match the people in my photos. I tried to match the green of the journal box with the photo mats. It's a close match but not exactly the same. I wanted a dark background to make the green pop and found 2 older pieces of brown paper. This is from an older travel collection in what CM would have called "Jewel Tones". The title was cut from the Cricut with green letters and backgrounds for balance (love the new Offset feature in Cricut Design Space).

After trimming the photos and arranging them I chose the ones that would get a mat (one short of course). For the unmatted photo, I found another journal box in the same Enchanted line. I fussy cut that small border from it and that balanced the last photo. The round circle on the bottom right is from a pack of laser-cut embellishments. It's green on the other side but not quite a match for the layout. The dark gray/black worked just as well given the frame in the journal box. I added 2 18th century stickers from my Eastern National scrapbook kit.

Picking up on the dark gray/black circle and frame led me to the Infinity Chain border maker cartridge on the bottom left. That is one 12" strip cut in half. The 6" piece is horizontally on the bottom of the page. Then I cut the other side into individual links and mounted them vertically on top. Final embellishments were more fussy cut leaves and branches from another journal box.

I'm creating these layouts while on vacation so I have a portion of my usual stash. It's really making me use up what I have--embellishments, papers, even scraps. Probably a good thing so that I get more room for new products!