Sweet Child of Mine | Pol Prince | Journalling

Hi scrappy friends! Pol here today with a new layout I created with this months theme in mind - journaling. 

I'm a bit hit and miss with journaling usually, I tend to add it after I've taken photos of my page since most of my pages are for design team work and will be viewed by a larger audience. Journaling is usually an afterthought for me, because I scrap more for the process and the art. I would like to try and include more journaling on my pages as a record for my children. With this in mind I've created a layout that not only tells a story, but even the photo itself is 'journaling'.

This page documents the sweet and funny messages my 17 year old son and 14 yr old daughter wrote in their Father's Day card to their step dad. We absolutely fell about laughing when we read it!

This month we were given some stencils to try from Lisa-Jane Johnson, who owns the Pretty My Page shop on Facebook, with an exciting new website coming very soon. 

My border paper is Websters Pages - an older collection that I brought up to date with the addition of some mixed media and colourful flair. 

To start with, after I had matted my white card to the border paper, I used the packaging technique to lightly add some light green Distress Ink to the top of my page. I gently sponged a darker shade of Distress Ink through one of the stencils a few times, then applied white texture paste through one of the stencils, gradually building up my base layers.

I matted my photo onto the same paper as my border, and punched out the ripped tap effect at the top. I then used foam tape to adhere my photo and mat over the inky area at the top of my page. 

I used pink and blue Distress Inks to gently sponge through two different stencils onto white cardstock, and cut them out to use as ephemera around my photo. I added enamel dots to the centres, which were also from Lisa-Jane's Pretty My Page shop.

I used three main clusters around my photo area which I defined using white thread. I added Cocoa Vanilla and Elle's Studio woodgrain shapes, fussy cut butterflies from the Kaisercraft Wildflower collection, Heidi Swapp word stickers, and flair from Cutz2luv.

I used blue Bella Blvd puffy heart stickers around my page, peeking out from behind layers. 

I absolutely love the black Pinkfresh alphas that I used for my title, in fact I love them so much I bought four packets! They last ages too because they come with lots of vowels.

I'm a massive fan of using song lyrics for my page titles, so you'll often come across a song title on my layouts!

Finally, last but not least, I wrote my journaling under my title, and splatted black ink around the page to tie it all together. 

Please do have a go at this months challenge featuring journaling, it's a great way to tell a story you've been meaning to write down, or even create a page without photos. Thanks for reading, see you all soon!