A shout out to Authentique and Scraputante!

A while back I was lucky enough to win 4 collection packs of Authentique papers in a Facebook draw from Scraputante.com, so I thought I'd share a project from each of the collections. I still have lots of paper, alphas and punchouts from each of them, too!

 This was created with the "Delightful" line, and I do think this litle squirrel is delightful! A dear friend sent me the cute handmade nest and the tag, and these just happened to show up in the mail while this layout was in progress...serendipity for sure!! The Maya road chippie branch was a gift from another good friend (scrappers are such wonderful people!) and I altered it with homemade embossing paste made using a recipe from the talented Gabrielle Pollacco (http://gabriellepollacco.blogspot.ca/2012/08/making-my-own-texture-paste-fun-with.html)

 Meet my handsome kitty Chester! This was created with the "Celebrate" collection; the pinwheels were printed on the paper, but I cut them out and popped them up with foam tape, then added brads. The kite and banner strips were handcut, the chippie frame was in my stash, and the title was done with alphas included in the kit.

Another kitty! This is our Chloe, and I used the "Renew" collection here. I love the colours in these papers! We were planning a trip to pick up our sone from university(2 hours each way) so I drew the lines and poked the holes for the stitching ahead of time, and it turned out to be a perfect way to pass several hours of car time! I love to handstitch on my layouts and do it often, but it is a tad time-consuming. The butterfly is a new Memory Box die-my wonderful LSS, Papercraft Cafe, is always bringing in new dies that I can't live without!

For a change, this layout features a creature of the two-legged and not so furry variety-my son Graham at age 2! He was so proud of himself clomping around in my cousin's hiking boots (hard to believe this little guy just turned 21-how time flies!) This is the "Curiosity" collection, which is mostly school-themed, but it worked perfectly here, especially because even at 2, my son loved books, letters and words.

I've always been a mix-and-match scrapper and usually tend to avoid kits and collections, but working with these has definitely made me rethink that; they were a pleasure to work with and I look forward to being able to create more projects with them!