WM#233 - be inspired by the Blue Heart of Delft

I was late - as usual - making up my layout for the Counterfeit Kit Challenge member blog hop last night and needed to make a page under time pressure. I had less than 60 minutes while the Formula 1 race was on to pull something together so that I could photograph it this morning to share on the hop. This might actually be the closest to the wire I've been.

Anyway, I was looking around for a story to tell and my eye fell upon the less than stellar Instax shot I had of the Blue Heart of Delft in question and even though the shot I shared on the blog last Monday was better, it seemed like a good idea to just use this print that I had in my hand.

Yes, it's a bit small to be there all on its own on the page but I wanted to use the Pinkfresh Studio paper as a full background and didn't want to cover too much of it up so it all sort of fell into place.

For the Counterfeit Kit Challenge, I went with the prompt #1 - to use fussy cutting on my project as well as prompt #3 - to fancy up the page killing several challenge birds with one stone.

Of course, the page is made using my Counterfeit Kit Challenge October kit, Lucid (lo#7) which is proving very successful. As you can see, I fussy cut roses from a Heidi Swapp paper - in fact, I cut up the whole sheet and have now used all the roses across three different layouts. It was only after I'd added them that I realised that they were actually totally reminiscent of the Delft Blue tiles which the town is so famous for.

And what about my page dress up? I added a splash of gold here and there with the transparency and the loopy thread (why do I so often forget to do this - I always love it!) and made sure I had a good splash of pretty pink to contrast with the blue and aqua tones.

You could also say that the mini strip of multi coloured paper there on the left is also just a pretty up strategy. I felt that I needed to get some of the brighter colours from my photo stack over to the other side to even things up.

I also think the tassel is also part of my dressing up the page as it's purely there for decoration and serves no other purpose! There are so often elements on my pages which have meaning - to me even if the reader can't always see it - but sometimes, I just like to literally pretty up the page by adding something like this.

And there you have it. Done.

Delft needs a fuller page which I'll do in time but I'm happy that I got this page done as a starting point.

We love it when you share too and you can do that at either of our Whimsical Musings groups which can be found at Flickr (here) or over at Facebook (here). Whichever is better for you is great for us. We will find you! Tag your layouts with WM#XXX so that we know which prompt you followed.