A Cool, Smooth Palette at CCG

Challenge 200 is live at Color Combos Galore. Two hundred color combos--that's quite a milestone, and we're going to be celebrating this week! Here's our Inspiration Board:

I didn't realize when I made the palette how difficult it was to find true blue paper, but after digging through my entire stash I finally found a true blue in a DCWV stack. The orange, which has a bit of a yellow tint to it was a little tricky too, but I found an OLD Scenic Route paper that was perfect, too. Actually, I had immediately thought of BasicGrey Dawson, which does indeed perfectly match the blues and also has some orange, but those papers didn't go with the feel of my page I had in mind...

The drippy-melty Designer's Challenge was a stretch for me. I've tried the drippy thing before because I always admire it on others' pages, but when I try it, it always comes out looking, well...drippy. And messy. And as much as I long break out of my "clean" box and get messy and drippy, I'm always afraid of messing up. So I opted for going melty. Specifically melting embossing powder.

Here are some details. I had originally planned to work off of a sketch and printed out my pictures larger, but once I got going, I decided I wanted to put Mom's recipe on my page, and went with the pretty Maya Road envelope, so I tossed the sketch and made the envelope an integral part of my page. Which is tricky since I scrap 8 x 8 and the envelope took up half of my page. So I reprinted the pictures smaller and designed my page around the envelope. I needed to do lots of overlapping. Once I'd assembled most of the page, I felt the pretty flap was still not pretty enough and felt too much like a blank, open space (and everyone knows I'm white-space challenged, lol), so I added this pretty My Mind's Eye doily stamp.

I had received this BoBunny Kitchen Spice stamp set when I was working for SNR and we were doing a Bo Bunny manufacturer feature, and it was perfect for my page. I had already planned to use this Martha Stewart doily, and to my surprise and delight, it fit perfectly inside theis stamp. Do I get "messy" points for stamping directly on my background paper? I'm always so afraid of messing up with stamps that I usually stamp on cardstock and cut out. That's a Prima flower, and underneath it is an ancient die-cut flower from Urban Lily. I'm such a hoarder, but I'm glad I kept that ugly thing to add another layer here, and it was the perfect shade of orange.

Here are some more stamps from that Bo Bunny set. And yes, I realize I should have a picture of my mom holding the meatloaf instead of just the ugly loaf by itself, but my mom's extremely camera shy, and when we go over for dinner, she's usually not dressed up or made up, so she forbade me to take a picture. I do hope she'll get over this soon. I need to have a serious talk with her about this lack of Mom pictures in my albums.

I used my very favorite chipboard letters--BasicGrey. They're small and cute and perfect for my 8 x 8 pages. I sure wish they'd make more colors! The blue letter stickers are old K&Co. that I dressed up with Ranger Enamel Accents. Love that stuff!

The reveal is fantastic again this week, so you should go take a peek at what the team did, and you'll definitely want to play along this week, as well as participate in our blog hop, which starts this Sunday, because there's going to be lots of prizes from the design team, as well as a culminating prize of a guest designer spot for the month of August! We'll be posting more details about that on Sunday.

Thank you so much for stopping by and reading about my page today!