Oh, what Joy!

Hello!  And Happy Monday to you!  I hope you've had a great start to the week.  Myself, I have a hard time going back to work on Mondays.  I wish we could just skip that day.  But, then I think Tuesdays would get the bad rep so I guess we'll just leave things the way they are for now. :)

Today I would like to share my first scrapbook page that I made with my January Counterfeit Kit Challenge kit I've called "Very Merry."  (If you need a reminder what was in there, or if you want to know more about what Counterfeit Kit Challenge is all about, see my post HERE.)  I also would like to enter this page into the first sketch challenge for the month over on the Stuck?! Sketches blog.  Here is their sketch:

And here is my page I've titled, "Oh, what Joy!"

This little guy in the pictures is my son on his very first Christmas when he was only 3 weeks old.  You know, back in 1991.  Yes, my son is now 26 years old so he's not that little guy anymore!  I didn't start scrapbooking until he was around 10 or 11 years old, so I still have all his baby pictures to scrap.  Plus, I'm not a chronological scrapper.  I just scrap whatever pictures I'm in the mood to do. (Which may explain why I don't have that many finished albums, but that's another topic for another day.)  I also have a tendency to put off scrapping pictures that, to me, are extra special and I want to make sure I get them "just right." Please, someone tell me they feel the same way???  But, I'm trying to let go of that "need for perfectionism" attitude, and I thought it was time to finally get these pictures scrapped.

Of course, it's obvious that I moved some things around from the sketch, but I hope you can still see it in there.  The sketch was a bit of a challenge, at first, but then I just started playing around and ended up having a lot of fun with it.  I used my Cricut cartridge "When I Was A Kid" for the snowflakes and I inked them with SU Soft Sky blue ink, just so they'd stand out a little more from the background. Plus it tied in with and pulled out the blue from the pattern paper.  See the red paper in the back with the snowflakes?  It was a bit of leftover from some project or another, and the word "Joy" that I used in the title was actually printed on that paper.  I fussy cut the word out, put it on cream cardstock to match the main background, and fussy cut it again.   And since I only had the one piece of cream cardstock to use for the background, I did the old trick of cutting a square of the cardstock out where I knew the red pattern paper would cover the hole and then I used the pictures to cover the hole in the red pattern paper where the word "Joy" had been cut out.

Double Cover Up Duty going on there!  Ha ha!  The page looks a bit odd from the back, but no one will see that side.

Everything I used for this page came from my January CKC kit except I did pull some white cardstock for photo matting and cutting the snowflakes, I used a piece of blue cardstock from my massive and ever growing scraps files to cut "Oh, What" for my title rather than cut into a full sheet, and I used a Cuttlebug font die set to cut those two words.

So, there you have it.  And it feels sooo good to finally have these pictures in the book, plus I used up some stash.  I call that a win-win situation.

And not bad for a Monday. :)