Capturing the Beauty of Summer

I just love summer time - especially the gorgeous flowers that bloom throughout the summer months. I love to capture that beauty on film but often don't know how to scrap those photos without it being - well - a little boring in my scrapbook.

The Lily Bee paper was just the fix to my dilemma. By selecting the neutral toned sheets of patterned paper with just hints of yellow, orange and burgundy, allowed for the bright oranges and reds of my photos to really pop off the page. For accents, I used clear acrylic butterfly stamps (Martha Stewart), stamped in brown Staz-On ink onto the orange Lily Bee patterned paper. When stamping, I tried to place the image in a way to get the pattern of the paper to mimic the symmetry of a butterfly's markings. Then I cut them out and added them to the layout with a glue dot in the center of the butterfly body so the wings would "fly".

After I had much of the layout together, it needed SOMETHING. I thought about a flourish, or doodling which led me to my sewing machine. I randomly stitched around the page to sort of emulate the butterfly's flight. I must admit that this was really a "random" layout. I just added things as I went - the lace was too white, so I inked it. The edges were too smooth, so I bent them over. The brown Chantilly Lace card stock was too, well, brown, so I dry brushed it with gesso. And randomly, the page came together.

So take some pictures of the summer's flowers (the black-eyed Susans are just GORGEOUS right now), pick up some Lily Bee paper and let your creativity go off in a random sort of way. We would LOVE to see what you come up with (so enter it into this month's challenge!!)