Challenge Completed - It's Fine to be 4

I was determined to get a page layout done today - and I challenged anyone who was also eager to get back to scrapping to play along.  The day got crazy and I just barely finished my own challenge by midnight.  If you want to see the pages that some Facebook friends made they are on the Capadia Designs Facebook page, here is a LINK.

This is the sketch that I made last year for a digital layout.  I offered this as a possibility but did not require that this sketch be used.  I did have a request to make a second page for a spread and I will try to do that - I just ran out of time today.  The sketch was easy to work with digitally but I found it a little busy when I actually tried it with paper.

I grabbed a stack of photos, yes, I have stacks and stacks of photos, many Creative Memories Power Sort boxes filled and still more in an odd assortment of containers.  I think these were duplicates that my sister-in-law gave me from our younger son's fourth birthday.  We actually have five family birthdays to celebrate within eight days in August - all three of the guys in our family (I am the odd one out in July) and also my mother-in-law and brother-in-law.  As of August '08, there are six since our great nephew was born on 08-08-08!

There were four photos that I wanted to use - actually five but this one could not be cropped to the square shape on the sketch.  I loved the expressions on the faces of our niece and Daddy and the birthday boy in this photo!

I did do a proper welded shadow for my title but I didn't like the way it looked after I cut it from paper - particularly since I used the plaid paper for the top layer.  The shadow or outline layer was too thin for my taste.  There is also a difference in the depth of the shadow as your characters get larger.  In this case,  "fine," "to be" and "4" are all in different sizes so there is quite a bit of variation.  One of the suggestions I made about improving Design Studio when I had a chance to talk to some of the product development people at Provo Craft was to add the ability to shadow any element and to vary the width of the shadows.  I know it can be done...I hope this makes the list!

In this case, I chose to place my top layer too high to create the effect of a dropped shadow and to give more definition to the letters.  This was a quick fix and it makes the title more legible.

The papers I used were mostly from an old favorite Creative Memories set called "Baby Boy Bright."  The one with the stars actually had a  rocket ship that is hidden by the layering.  If you are looking for any Creative Memories discontinued items and can't find them locally, be sure to contact me - the chances are fairly good that I might have what you are looking for in my stash.  The blue background and journaling circle are from the Martha Stewart value pack I got in Pennsylvania and the striped paper for the largest circle is K and Co. from a large assorted box.

The swirl is from Straight from the Nest and is cut from white DCWV glitter cardstock.  This heavy cardstock cuts very well if you use multi-cut 2 when cutting it at high pressure and blade depth 6.

In order to have the swirl facing in the correct direction, I flipped the element on the keypad and rotated it 180 degrees.  I had to do this since the glitter cardstock is one sided.

I still need to add my journaling and I may find a few embellishments that suit to add to the page.  I am normally a "flat scrapper" and I save the bulky embellishments for special pages that won't be put into regular albums.

The title just popped into my head because our younger son will usually say "fine" whenever you ask him how he is - even when he was a bit under the weather as a child, he was always "fine."  So it was fine to be four!  Everyone is wearing the same shirts because we had all been at a family reunion earlier in the day.  I don't know if you can see the Pepsi can in a couple of the photos. I purposefully did not try to crop it out
because my husband has always liked Pepsi since his great-grandmother would give it to him as a treat.

It is amazing how many stories will come into your mind when doing a simple page like this.  After all, that is what scrapbooking is all about - preserving those memories for ourselves and for generations to come (and yes, playing with pretty paper and images will always be fun!).