snow buddies

This week's sketch challenge at Scrapbook Steals was perfect for a picture I snapped of my son and his neighborhood pals.  I already had a 5x7 printed of this picture, not sure what I was going to do with it.  I was a bit concerned how I would coordinate papers with the boys' colorful outfits, but once I started putting papers together, I quickly settled on a red/aqua theme.

I machine stitched a zig zag border around my gray paper, although many of the stitches broke loose-oops!  The large white snowflake is actually a Christmas ornament I picked up on clearance from Target a few years back.  I believe I got a three pack of them for .50, and it was the perfect embellishment for this page.  The red scarf accent happened quite by accident.  I originally set out to pleat a piece of red fabric or ribbon, similar to the pleated burlap on the inspiration layout.  I found a piece of red felt in my fabric stash and I cut out a strip and laid it down on my layout.  Suddenly, it reminded me of a scarf, so I cut two shorter strips that I layered and snipped fringes into the ends. The only thing I'm not happy about are the snowflakes punched into my journaling spot, but I was too lazy to make a different one, so it will have to do.  This turned out to be one of my favorite layouts I've created in a while, mostly because I was able to complete it while home with my kiddos waiting on a two hour school delay. 

I've been faithfully playing along with the weekly sketch challenges at Scrapbook Steals, but due to difficulties with Blogger, I wasn't able to get photos to attach to my blog posts, so there were several weeks where I wasn't able to enter the drawing.   I did post them to the Scrapbook Steals facebook page so you may have seen them there.  Here are some of the layouts that were completed but never posted: