7 years

A couple of weeks ago, hubby and I celebrated our seventh anniversary and my parents celebrated their 48th just a few days earlier. So as an anniversary gift for both of us, the four of us went to a hockey game on the Saturday night between their anniversary and ours, back to the scene of the crime as one might say. Well, not really because this game was in the Rose Garden, not Veteran's Memorial Coliseum, but it was as close as we could get.


I surprised both my parents and my husband with having anniversary wishes posted on the big screen (a big thank you to the Hawks for comping me the posting cost since we were the ones who got married on the ice). Hubby was actually surprised. He said he had thought about doing it but didn't know who to contact. (I do!) It was a fun addition to an otherwise wonderful game.


So on our actual anniversary, I gave him his card and he asked me to make a scrapbook page for it and he asked that I include one of the roses he gave me. So last weekend I tried my hand at drying a rose. I was really surprised how well it turned out and how easy it was to do. Just cover the flower with the drying powder and wait.


I also found the perfect shadow box, but the page design was a little elusive. I have a very clean and graphic style and I just didn't want to do the same thing all over again. I wanted to try some new things. I had this idea about making my own background paper using some Co'ordinations Black Magic paper I bought a while ago. So last night, I played around in SCAL and created a whole page of the number 7 (the number of years we've been married) in Old English Text for the font. I printed a test page using a sharpie and my Chomas Sharpie holder for the Cricut. When I had what I wanted, I switched out for the embossing tip and held my breath. It turned out perfectly. A bit of sanding later and a little use of a stylus to make some of the sevens stand out more than others and I was thrilled with my personalized background paper. It was so not my usual style but I love, love, love it.


But then I couldn't make the rest of the layout come together. I fussed with it until nearly 1 in the morning last night, gave up and went upstairs to watch the last two stories on Five that I DVR'd off Lifetime earlier in the week, hoping that creativity would come to me in the night. Well, that didn't happen, so I flipped through some sketch books (Page Maps and Page Maps 2, plus the Best of Becky Higgins Sketches) this morning but finally drew some inspiration from a sketch from Page Maps from July 2009. (I have just got to add that the best thing I ever did to inspire myself was to buy a plain old notebook and some page protectors and print pages of sketches that I like and put them in the notebook. I have all this inspiration in one convenient place. Wonderful! Although I need to get a bigger notebook now).


What really inspired me was the off kilter nature of the pictures, which I switch to landscape instead of portrait. Plus I didn't want to cover too much of my background so I ditched a lot of the background of the layout to leave more open space. In retrospect, it really looks nothing like the sketch that inspired me, but that's the point. I don't need to recreate something someone else has done, but simply take inspiration from them. But once I had all the pictures in place, it was really still missing something. I put it in the shadowbox and I just wasn't happy. It needed bling. Hubby looked at it and was suggesting things he thought would work to make it all come together. But I really knew it just needed some bling. But the swirly bling I had on hand was black or pearl. Neither would work. But then I remember that I bought the templates for the I-Rock bling. Perfect! I was going to get to do something else I haven't done before as I bought these but had never used them. I was a little hesitant, but once I got started it was so easy to use and it turned out that was exactly what it needed. I'm sure everything is going to have I-rock bling now that I know how easy the templates are to use.


Unfortunately, the glass of the shadowbox reflects too much that I had to take the picture with the door open, but you get the idea.