Trying to use my stash...

I'm trying really hard not to buy any new papers until I use up more of my stash. I figure if I want to buy some of the new lines that are coming out at CHA next month I better get rid of some of the stuff I have already - you know how us scrappers love to hoard papers, lol. So far I'm not doing to badly at using stuff up. Pam at My Creative Scrapbooks just packs her kits with so many goodies you can get so many layouts done with each kit and still have leftovers, which, if your joining a kit club is a good thing to know!

This first one I've done her is a photo of a friend of mine and myself that was taken at another friend's place on New Years Eve. She is such a great person and we always laugh when we get together, one of our things we always tell our other friends is that "For a couple of old broads, we don't look to bad!", lol. These papers are from the January 2011 LE Kit from My Creative Scrapbook. When I pulled out my piece of green background paper that I wanted to use for this layout I realized that my paper was short about and inch and a half so I thought I was pretty sneaky and got three other sheets of left over paper from the kit and punched them and laid them down on top of each other at the top of the layout to cover up the shortage - sometimes my brain actually works, lol. I did some fussy cutting of the flowers from one of the other sheets of paper from the kit  for the bottom two corners and popped them up with foam. Included in this kit was this great package from Pink Paislee called "Artisan Elements" - they look like white chipboard but they have more of a plastic/rubber type feel to them and you can distress them, mist them, paint them and pretty much anything else you'd like to do with them. There are four corner pieces and then about 8 other circle shapes going from large to small - they are very cool looking. I decided I just want to leave mine white and I use that one to frame my photo. I did a bit of layering with the other papers from the kit and then used these pretty brown and red Prima flowers. Remember if you click on the photo you can see a larger view of the photo.

This next layout I've used a photo of myself and My friend's cute little great niece, Lucy, that I finally got to meet when I was down visiting in Portland. She was so cute when she was leaving to go home she was waving to us and saying "Bye Gramma's". I think because her real Gramma (my friends sister) and my friend and I are all blonde she figures anyone older with blonde hair is a Gramma, so funny. I used the Feb 2011 LE kit for this layout - I've still got some left over even after doing this one, lol. I just love this collection "Once Upon a Springtime" from Graphic45! I just love all the cute little fairies in this collection so I did a lot of fussy cutting of the fairies from the paper plus the flowers. I did some layering and distressing and added Prima flowers that came in the kit as well as some I had in my stash. The white flowers I made but for the centers I used some tiny Prima rose buds that I had in my stash. I also added a little bit of white picket fencing that I had in my stash. It really took me about two days of playing around with this layout before I was finally happy enough with it to start gluing and taping things down. So here is how it turned out, hope you like it and remember I love to hear your comments! TFL!