Hello Jack - Time for your Lobotomy!

When those words popped out of my son's mouth as he started to carve his Halloween pumpkin, I cracked up. When he explained it came from a Calvin & Hobbes cartoon, I knew I had a layout in my future. Lucky for me that Lisa picked such great papers from the Creative Imaginations Trickery Line and My Mind's Eye for the Design Team kit this month!

This layout is a little different from my normal style. I was going for a collage effect. It allowed me to include lots of different elements - stamps, chipboard, ribbon, dimensional stickers, machine stitching, a charm, more stamps, more stickers - and a comic strip of course!

The comic strip was actually my starting point. I pulled out my I-kan-dee Chalks by Pebbles, Inc and used some orange to accent just the pumpkins. I also added a little ink around the edges to soften the stark white of the paper.

Next up was the chipboard pumpkin, which I colored with Stazon ink and then heat embossed with Holographic Embossing powder. I enjoyed that so much, I decided to stamp and emboss some leaves to use as a sparkly accent.

Lisa included Tim Holtz Fragments in the kit this month - something I had never played with before. I had 3 very small pieces to work with but they were the perfect match for the Creative Imaginations jack-o-lantern paper, which is covered with little Halloween themed icons. I snipped out a few, inked the edges with a touch of orange, and used Memory Mount to glue them to the fragments. What a cool and easy way to add dimension!

The die-cut mini page from Teresa Collins and the journaling block from Creative Imaginations added another eclectic touch to the collage. Bright green thread for the stitching pulled out the bits of green in the pictures and added a subtle punch of color.

I used several stamps as accents around the page...words, pumpkins, spiders...as well as the dimensional stickers from the kit.

The last item I added was the circular sticker of the trick-or-treaters. Believe it or not, it came inside a big bag of Doritos! It was a perfect find - the striped background echoed the striped paper, and the image illustrated the word stickers just above it. Serendipity!

Like I said, this was a different kind of layout for me, but it was a lot of fun and a little bit of a challenge. I think I will step outside my comfort zone more often!