April Showers???

When I found out the topic for this week's Design Team projects at The Beary Scrap, images of lovely spring rains came to my mind -- a light soft rain that greens up the grass and has drops that gather on the new petals of flowers and trees. Rain you can go out, splash around and play in. You know, like Gene Kelly dancing down the street to "Singin' in the Rain."

Unfortunately that kind of rain doesn't really exist in Southeast Idaho. Spring here is quite sporadic-- a few days here, a few there with lots of cold wintry days in between where there could be anything from wind to freezing temperatures, hail storms to actual snow. And so my layout depicts a true "April Shower" in Idaho.

I used the sketch from "Oh Alice" this week (pictured below, make sure you head over to their blog to check out more ideas!) but instead of making a card, I rotated the whole thing 45 degrees and then made a 12 x 12 layout. I really enjoyed this sketch as it was fairly simple and encompassed just basic shapes-- this gave me a great place to start but left lots of room for my own ideas to take over.

I also used Basic Grey's Kioshi line this week-- I am starting to think Susan and I share a definite connection with the papers we pick out! I used Lilo for the long horizontal rectangle and Motochi for the larger vertical rectangle. All of my pictures and journaling are matted on the back side of Lilo and Water Lily. I just love these Kioshi papers-- they have such light, pretty pastel colors mixed with BROWN, probably my all time favorite go-to color for scrapping. The patterns vary a lot too, from florals little and big to dots, stripes, plaids and other geometric designs, making these very versatile papers.

One of my favorite things about spring is the tough little daffodils, tulips, crocuses, etc. that poke their heads up through (in Idaho) the snow and brave the cold in hopes of some sunshine. So I just had to have some tulips on my layout. I used a paper piecing pattern found at the Scrapbooks, Etc. website that I downloaded for free. It was very simple and fun to do. I used both some Bazzill cardstock and some of the Kioshi paper to make the tulips, both worked great. After wetting and bending the edges of my flowers as they instruct, I also chalked around the edges to give them a little more dimension (I have Pebbles, Inc. chalk in bright colors). Then for the snow!

I finally just used some Stickles but decided that didn't really look like snow, just sparkly and so I pulled out some DecoArt SnowTex that I have used when making Christmas decorations. I had honestly never thought of using it on paper before but I think I am now hooked and can see using it on all kinds of Christmas and playing in the snow type pages. I applied the SnowTex with a small paintbrush BEFORE attaching the flowers to my page-- this turned out to be a very good plan as when I put some more snow on my title letters that were already attached, it was hard to keep it from getting on the cardstock. When the SnowTex was dry (about 20 minutes) I used a little Stickles in Icicle over the top to give just a little sparkle and I love how it turned out!

I added some letter stickers for the title, with a little rickrack for good measure, and a few pearls along the edges of my Kioshi rectangles to finish it off. My April Shower page is finished-- now all I have to do is be brave, poke my head out through the snow and wait for the sun to shine!

Check back tomorrow for some more April Shower inspirations by The Beary Scrap Design Team! And while you are here make sure to get entered in the running for our FABULOUS BLOG CANDY! I have never seen such a great assortment of scrap goodies, all coordinated too, being given away. So make sure to become a follower of our blog, post the blog candy on your own blog with a link back and then come back here to leave a comment by the blue frog. Good luck!