The Gondola {Creative Scrappers Sketch #218}

We are live with a brand-new sketch at Creative Scrappers:

I made another page for Monica's book. For those who don't know, my best friend's daughter, Monica, lost her 23-year-old husband to bone cancer after a valiant battle with this evil disease since he was diagnosed at the age of 17. It's so heartbreaking, but a little ray of hope is that Monica's pregnant with James's baby. I'm grabbing photos off of Monica and James's Facebook pages and making a book for her. 

This photo is from their wedding. They got married in one of those Las Vegas chapels. I knew I wanted to use BasicGrey to create an elegant sort of page, and when I was going through my [immense] stash of BasicGrey, I landed on Blitzen. I know it's a Christmas collection, but that green and blue damask went well with the water, and the red went with the gondolier's sash, so I thought, what the heck, I'll use this!

Here are some close-ups. I originally had large strip of the damask paper because that's how it showed in the sketch, but my layout was looking too plain, so I cut it up. I also originally only had one of those cut-out designs that you see above and below the photo, but again, the layout just felt too plain, so I added a second one to the top and bottom, tucked under another layer. I was originally thinking of maybe doing hearts where the stars are in the sketch, but settled on the pearls, which I think was a good decision. The chipboard heart, which you can just see in the photo below is by Heidi Swapp. Just about everything on this page is ancient!

I was looking for a pretty border and came across this gold one by K&Co. that I got on clearance and it seemed to perfectly match the golden glow behind the balcony in the background. I love to add word and phrase stickers to my pages, so that's what I used in place of the flags in the sketch. I couldn't fit three on my 8 x 8 page.

I love these BasicGrey letters. When I was finished with my layout, I kept thinking it was too plain, and I kept trying to add things, but they just didn't look quite right. The last little detail I added to my page was a little cut-out design from that same paper I had used and added it to the title.

This layout isn't quite as detailed and layered as I tend to like to make my pages, but in the end, I think it has an elegant feel I was going for, and I hope Monica will like it!

Go check out all the awesome takes on this great sketch by the Creative Scrappers team, and I hope you'll play along with us. It was a really fun sketch to work with.

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