MyGrafico Monday on a Scrapbook Page

I started my "creative days" when I was a kid - I loved to play with playdough, color, draw, eventually learning to sew and embroider and even dabble with knitting a bit. But when I started scrapbooking, it opened even more days into creating - paper crafts. I started scrapbooking to assist my daughter who had an interest in scrapbooking and that was about 15 years ago.

During that time, I was also introduced to stamping and fell in love! While I continued to scrapbook regularly, I also worked on learning more about stamping and the passion grew! I joined Close To My Heart almost 10 years ago and began to focus more on the stamping, mostly because making a card is quicker and easier than creating a layout. But I still love scrapbooking and once in awhile, get inspired to create a page or two for our family album. (A little over a year ago, I completed an album for our son who was graduating from high school. This album covered the years that we had been in our current home - 6 years - and included a LOT of pages. Since then, scrapbooking has taken a bit of a backseat - I think I burned myself out a bit!)

But when I saw the images we were going to work with for MyGrafico Challenges today, I immediately though of a layout. I knew the image would be almost large enough to create a border on my page and would have in fact been 12" long if my printer could accomodate 12" paper! And I've had these photos around for a couple of years so they were a perfect fit!

Now let me tell you a bit about this challenge first and foremost. Our hostess for the week is Katie, another Design Team member, and she created a 1-2-3 challenge for us. We were to use 1 image (that would be the squirrel on the tree branch - all of that is one image), 2 patterned papers (one you see is leaf printed and you can barely see at the top and the bottom of the layout, a brown printed paper - sorry the photo doesn't show it better), and 3 embellishments - I have brads holding the word "nutty", a couple of gold metal leaf charms, and a photo clip on the bottom left photo. (Click the picture for a larger view).

We have so many squirrels in our neighborhood, usually 6-7 in our yard at any given time, romping, chasing each other, driving the dog crazy....this day, there was just a loner hanging out in the yard, chattering at me. So I grabbed a few photos and voila, now a layout!

Want to play along? Create something with an Autumn theme, preferably using images from MyGrafico. Then head over to the challenge blog and link up! You might just win this entire set:

If you would like to see an awesome corkboard project using this same image, be sure to check out out guest designer, Mel and visit the rest of the team to see what they have created as well.

Thanks for stopping by and have a creative week!