Precious Moments - Chris Sexton

Hi, everyone. I've been following the Pixels and Paper Challenge site for a while and I finally decided to enter a layout. I loved May's inspiration photo of ladies in white dancing in a field round a maypole. It reminded me of my wedding day, as we had our photos taken in a local park among the trees and flowers. Our photographer snapped away as we fooled around and one of my favourite photos is of my husband and I dancing together, laughing our heads off and having so much fun. The light was fading and the photo quality isn't great but I love the feelings it stirs in me. We were so in love and beyond happy that day.

 I have created a monochrome layout as I wanted to keep the colours simple and stick with a green and white theme to reflect the location of the photo shoot. The lace border portrays the lace edging on my dress, and the white embossed cardstock reminds me of my dress fabric, which had a small sprig embossed into it.
  This park had a special wooden entrance and a timber fence, so I chose chipboard pieces , which I finished with white Glossy Accents, to represent this.

I found some gorgeous pattern paper by Basic Grey that I've had a number of years, which made a perfect background. All I had to do was stamp some foliage in a darker green behind the fence.

I finished off with some green ribbon vine, pearl flourishes, flower sprigs and rosebuds, plus a LOVE tile embellishment.

I'm really happy with the result. I hope you like it too.
Cheers,
            Chris.

Cherish - Chris Sexton

I loved the ARTastic inspiration artwork for May, AMARYS by Robert Hagan. It made me wish I had a photo along those lines but not having had children of my own made that difficult. The mother and child photos of my sister and my nieces I'd already done layouts for and unfortunately I have no photos of myself with my mother when I was a child. This situation resulted in me frantically searching through numerous boxes and lo and behold, I came across a photo of my husband and his mum taken on the day of his christening. I'm sure he's wearing an outfit made by his mother as she was a prolific knitter. She looks so proud of him and he looks quite pleased with himself.

I wanted to emulate the scalloped edge of the baby bonnet so I added several rows of paper lace down the side of the photo. Some of these were punched and some were fussy cut from pattern paper.  Inked edges and a few pearls finished them off.

The paper I used for the background had gorgeous roses round the border so I used  rosebuds and sweet little daisies in the top  corner of the layout. I rolled the corner and backed the flower arrangement with some paper lace and cardstock.

Because the inspiration piece had flowers in it I added lots more rosebuds and daisies to a chipboard flourish on the left side of the photo. The underlying leaves were die-cuts from a kit which I toned down with Tim's Distress Stain - Picket Fence. The crocheted doily is a nod to my husband's mum and the pearls reflect her pearl necklace.
I loved doing this layout and am grateful for the push to find an appropriate photo. Thanks for the inspiration.
Cheers. Chris.