And Now For Something Completely Different...

I thought I would share something different with you today.  I'm not really a scrapbooker but I have created a few pages over the past year.  Most of them have been given to family members as gifts and alas! I forgot to take pictures of them before I gave them away.  I do have a couple of pages that I managed to photograph however.  The one I'm showing today is the first page I made and as you can tell, the photograph is quite old.
This was my younger sister, Patty, on her wedding day in 1978 at the Botanical Gardens in Fort Worth.  I have always loved this picture of her.  She and I mixed like oil and water when we were kids but over the years, we became best friends and when I lived in Houston during the 23 years of my marriage, she was the one who came to visit me regularly.  She was my crafting buddy in addition to being my BFF and confidante.

Sadly to say, I lost her in May of last year, less than a week after my birthday, 3 days before the 9th anniversary of my mother's passing and 9 days before the 7th anniversary of my father's passing.  Patty lost her 6 year long battle with breast cancer and I still haven't gotten over her loss.  Sorry to be a little nostalgic here but I think a little history is called for in this instance.  Anyway, because I love this picture so much, I decided to use it as the subject for my first layout.

The background paper is by Karen Russell for Creative Imaginations and as you can see from the second photo, it was originally a black line drawing on a cream colored background.  I decided to color in the floral motif using Prismacolor pencils (this was before I got my Copic markers) to bring out the red rose my sister is holding in the photo.  I'm not sure how well this detail is captured in these pictures but the coloring really changed the overall look of the layout.  Red is not a color usually associated with weddings, other than Christmas weddings that is, but I wanted to accentuate it in this layout so I used touches of it in the flowers and in the paper strip design on the left side.  My Cutter Bee Circle Scissor was used to cut the circle a little over half way around and then I used a very sharp craft knife and detail scissors to cut out the background around the floral motif so that the picture would show behind the cut outs. Another circle, about a half inch smaller in diameter was cut and placed behind the page to create the red frame for the photo.  I used glass pebbles and rhinestones for the centers of the flowers, added the tiny pink rhinestone heart, journal tag and if you have checked out my post from 2/24 you'll recognize the title, "Always and Forever" which I cut on my Silhouette.

And here's how it turned out:

It's much prettier and the colors are more vibrant than the picture shows.  I thought it turned out pretty well for my first attempt.  Thanks for looking.  I look forward to reading your comments.

Have a fantastic week!
Anniebee