Do Not Open ‘Til Dec 25

Hi hi!

Do you find that sometimes you come across the right embellishment or title at just the right moment? Well that was the case with this layout. Every year Santa comes to the rugby club to give all the junior players a tube of sweets. Every year we have to tell the kids not to eat them with their dirty hands – bleurgh. Every year they take the caps off and pour them into their mouths instead. They can’t even wait till the end of the session, let alone until Christmas. And please note that Santa is the smallest person in the boy’s picture…

So the inspiration for this layout was a sketch challenge in the December Go Go cyber crop. The example layout used a cut file I think, so I chose the Christmas Tree Border file by Paige Evan, however I altered it slightly so that there were less trees by removing the slimmer ones and stretching the rest out. I used some really small scraps for the back-filling including some very old gold handmade paper for the stars.

I didn’t want to use a white background but there was already a lot of colour going on. Looking through my Pebble’s Merry Little Christmas kit that I made, I saw a paper that had trees and children playing on it, which I thought would be great, BUT it was a bit too busy. So I found a sheet of plain vellum to lay over the top to push the imagery into the background more and give it more distance from the trees in the foreground, that I popped up onto foam for even more dimension.

With the cut file and photos in place, once I’d added the tag for the title there wasn’t really room for much else. Having the spot of red in the tag, I decided to add 2 more pops of colour to create my visual triangle.

Unusually for me I didn’t then finish off by adding enamel dots or twiddly bits, but I did manage to add my journalling and the actual date, which is something that often gets missed! I’ve been pretty good at getting the journalling on as part of the layout with this current pile, rather than thinking I’ll add it later and not getting around to it. I’m counting that as a win 🙂

Stay safe and keep smiling 🙂

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