The Wave Machine

   For me...sunshine means getting outside to play in the pool! Living in a warm climate means that I have tons of poolside photos to scrap.So, I was very excited to see that Scrap Our Stash's April challenge revolved around the sun. I started off by pulling out my pool and beach theme project folder. It is bursting at the seams with paper and embellishments perfect for scrapping water based activities. However, the more I looked at the photos I had chosen for this project, the more I knew that these were not the right papers to use this time.
   Sometimes the story behind a page takes precedence over a traditional theme. This two page layout was just such a case. In the photos I had picked, my husband is pushing a raft up and down in the water to create waves for my son to play in. My son has come to refer to this as the Daddy wave machine. So rather than use traditional papers with a sun or pool theme,I decided to make things look a little more mechanical.

I chose a metallic silver card stock as the base. Splattering it with Sapphire blue glimmer mist gave the appearance of water. I staggered the photos in a diagonal line across both pages... giving it the appearance of movement, like waves moving up and down.I painted some Maya road gear shaped chipboard pieces with silver acrylic paint. I used a tuxedo black bic mark it to outline the cogs and gears. This gave it a little more detail and helped them stand out from the page a bit more. To make the word " wave", I hand cut some letters from the cover of a paper pad, then wrapped them in foil. I used Stream alcohol ink( from ranger) to give the turquoise color. I visually anchored the photos to the page using strips of recollections paper. and hand stitching. To make the appearance of waves in the machine, I used a template to trace a wave border onto a piece of blue textured carstock. it's been in my stash for awhile and was actually the only thing I used out of my project pack.

I used the same border template to make the journal strips. I traced it on a scrap sheet of white card stock, then moved the template down a bit and tracing the border again. I do recommend journaling before you cut out the strips. It makes it easier to write.