23 December 2012 — Sugar Plum Dreams

On Friday Michelle Shefveland sent an email to her Cottage Arts Creative Team about this new kit that was in the store and ready for our scrapping pleasure:

If you're not familiar with digital scrapbooking kits, the image above probably looks like a mess. It's a kit preview showing most, if not all, of what's in the kit. That includes papers, elements (frames, the music note, etc.), word art, and sometimes an alphabet of individual letters.

About the same time Elisabeth sent me some cute photos of my favorite grandson 2^nd Peter, including this one:

Perfect timing—a kit and a photo to make a scrapbooking page. However, . . .

The kit is about The Nutcracker, and it's not very masculine. The photos of Peter are quite colorful. (And he’s got drool on the upper side of his face. How is that possible?) 

This kit and this photo probably don’t seem like the basis for a good layout. The colors of the two don’t work well together, and typically little boys don’t dream about being Clara, the lead ballerina in The Nutcracker.

However, we have a favorite family story about 2^nd Peter’s father Blake and the movie version of The Nutcracker. Suffice it to say he did not enjoy it. 

I took the photo above and converted it to black and white so the colors in it wouldn’t detract from the page. (And I removed the drool.) Then I added various papers and elements from Michele’s kit. That involved resizing, recoloring, blending, and other fun Photoshop tricks and techniques that end in –ing. A little journaling was added below the photo (like anyone in the family could forget the Blake incident).

Voilà! Here’s the final result:

I love preserving family memories. Maybe one day Peter will see this page and ask his dad about the story. On second thought I think he’ll hear it every year at Christmas time, whenever anyone mentions The Nutcracker in Blake’s presence.