A Soft and Dreamy Palette with a Touch of Drama

Challenge 193 went live at Color Combos Galore last night. I got to make the inspiration board again. I was in love with this picture, and it made for a fun Designer's Challenge--to tell a story. Sometimes we get all caught up in the "eye candy" when we're making layouts, so I thought it would be fun to challenge the design team and CCG players to tell a story on their page. Here's the Inspiration Board:

And here's the page I made. I put the beginning of my journaling on the front and told the rest of the story on the back. As I was digging through my stash to find the right pink, I came across BasicGrey's Sugared collection, and the green was in there too! I tend to hoard my BasicGrey papers, so I was pleased to use some this week.

I used this sketch from Once Upon a Sketch, a challenge blog run by one of my design teammates, Nadia Cannizzo, as inspiration for my page design:

Journaling on the back reads: I fell in love with the ring when I saw it at the antique market in Adamstown, Pennsylvania. We were saving money to buy a new refrigerator, but Farzad said I should get the ring because I loved it so much. (Who needs a refrigerator, anyway?) The ring was a gold hand holding a ruby. The ruby was a very light red, almost pink, and it had a big flaw in the bottom, but I didn't care. This ring was so unique and beautiful to me. I was completely enchanted.

I had the ring for a couple of years and wore it daily, until one day I discovered the ruby had fallen out. We searched and searched for that little gem, but it had disappeared. And so my gold ring sat on my dresser with its empty prongs mocking me. One night, at least a month after the ruby had disappeared, Farzad woke up out of a dead sleep, went downstairs, and found it buried in the carpet. So uncanny and so, so wonderful that he has this strange ability to find things. I truly think he's psychic. We had the stone put back into the ring, and there it has stayed ever since.

Here are a few detail photos... The cool dimensional butterflies are by Pink Paislee. My layout didn't originally have those butterflies. I have recently learned that it helps to let a layout sit overnight and then look at it the next day with fresh eyes. My layout looked fine the day before, but when I picked it up the next day to photograph it, I realized that it was just too plain, and I searched for something to add some interest.

I also added the word stickers the next day. That puffy "treasure" sticker is by K&Co. I love that border punch--it's by EK Success.

I punched some of the designs from one of the BasicGrey papers and adhered them with pop dots.

The jouraling spot is from The Graphics Fairy. The black puffy letters are actually sparkly--doesn't show up that way in the picture. They're American Crafts Thickers, and I got them in a "value pack" at Home Goods--there were four packs of Thickers for like five bucks.

I used pink rhinestones on the centers of the circles, and at the last minute, I added one to the ring in the photo.

The design team did a beautiful job, as always, so you should pop over and see what they made with this challenge! And I do hope you'll play along. So fun to tell stories...

Thank you so much for visiting my blog and reading about my page!