Well let me start this post by saying a big MERRY CHRISTMAS to everyone!

I hope you are all having a lovely day spent with those near and dear to you. At this present time my Christmas Day will be all but over. I will probably be asleep by now after hosting twenty odd people at my house!  We will have had exchanged gifts , eaten far too much throughout the day and be getting a good nights sleep ready to do it all again to celebrate Boxing Day in Australia. Another day that we get together with family and eat too much! Reflecting on the day always leaves me to feel quite blessed …and tired!

I have been creating a lot of Christmas layouts recently so I decided to document another celebration, my daughters third birthday from October which I have not yet documented. When I saw Ashley’s recent weekly sketch challenge I knew this would be a perfect way to incorporate it.

Here is the sketch, the challenge closed last night on the Forum but you are still free to use it as inspiration like I have.

And here is my layout. I have adapted the two photos into one large 5×7″ photo. I have also put the three line title together at the top of the page rather than separated by the photo. I am really happy with how it turned out.

I have recently seen Nancy altering wood veneer by masking off sections and painting them. I was inspired to give this a go with my favourite gold embossing powder. It worked a treat and I am so happy with how it turned out!

I also embossed a couple of the diamond shaped veneer and scattered those and the crosses in a diagonal direction across the page. I added a couple of Heidi Swapp star rub ons and a splattering of Gold Lame Colour Shine.

As I have embellished the top right of the page, I felt I needed to balance the bottom left. I did this with an embellishment cluster of mainly the gorgeous shine ephemera.

To create the love heart I used the exclusive heart background cut file by Ashley and cut it so that I only had the one heart. I then enlarged it to take up approx. a 10″ space. Once backed each section with the four sections in the gorgeous patterned paper by Seven Paper from the Goldie collection.

I hope this layout has given you some inspiration today. I will have a process video uploaded to my You Tube channel soon, so it you don’t subscribe already you can follow me here

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas, may your day be blessed with joy, love and peace xxx