CCG + HMITM = One Fun Page!

I've had an extremely busy couple of weeks between my scrappy life and my home life. We're buying a house and have been cleaning, cleaning, cleaning to get our house ready to list. So I last week I had to choose between doing a page for Color Combos Galore or doing a page for How Much Is Too Much. In the end, I decided I couldn't decide, so I combined the challenges. Here's the Inspiration Board I had to work with:

Our challenge at HMITM is called Clowning Around (It's International Clown Week), and we had to use:

• 8 buttons
• 1 flower
• 11 different patterned papers
• 1 red circle
• mist or paint

From this prompt, I immediately thought of making a page for my Book of Silly (yes, I have an album of silly family photos--actually several volumes). Debbie had provided a picture of a clown to use as inspiration, and as I was going through my photos, I came upon this picture of my nephew with his hair dyed bright red for school spirit week, and I knew it was the perfect photo for both of my challenges. Here's the page I came up with (for the life of me, I couldn't get a straight photo of this page--sorry!):

I used sketch 166 from Creative Scrappers as inspiration for my page. (Ever since I got on the CS design team, I set a goal to go back and do all of the sketches--which will take me a long time since there are so many!)

Here are a few details. I love Brian Andreas. I have all of his Storypeople books, and I use a lot of his stories for my Book of Silly. I thought this quote would be fun to use with this picture. I made the journaling label by using the RGB codes to get the perfect colors and then printed it out on photo paper.

That electron thingy with the pearl in the center is a BasicGrey rub-on, rubbed onto a transparency.

Eleven patterned papers are a LOT for an 8 x 8 page, so I decided to use bits and pieces cut from papers. The background woodgrain is Hambly. They gray is by American Crafts. The red polka dots and the eye charts are by Jillibean Soup. The periodic elements paper is Reminisce. Those green circles with the off-white bubbles in them are cut from a Crate Paper pattern, and the circle numbers are cut from a My Mind's Eye paper.

Here you can see more patterned papers I used. The red circle with the star is from an old Scenic Route Christmas paper. The leaves are cut from a Luxe Designs Paper. They wre bright lime green, so to tone them down, I added an olive colored chalk. They were still too bright, so I brushed gesso over them, and that gave me almost the perfect shade of green for the palette. I got that electron image from the Internet and printed it on photo paper. The part of the HMITM challenge that was trickiest for me was the flower. I didn't want a girly page, so I hunted through my stash to find something that would meet the flower requirement and found this little brad. I found a bunch of gray buttons in my stash to meet the 8 button requirement.

You'll have to go check out the awesome work the CCG and HMITM teams did with these challenges, and I hope you'll play along. Both challenges are immensely fun!

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