Story first and then Sketch

I have something to celebrate.  Today is my 1000th post!  I started blogging in February of 2009 and never really imagined where it would lead.  Thank you for stopping by.

So now onto the layout.

When I started this page, I really didn't know what kind of arrangement I wanted.  I decided on a large letter title and figured it would go under the photos but that was about it.

So I did something I used to always do before even beginning a page.  I typed up my journaling.

By typing the journaling, I could see how much room I needed for it but more importantly I saw that I needed some space for journaling both before and after the title.  This led to the layout.

The story here is about our little squirrel my husband has named the Pirate.  He only has one good eye and he is thief.  He steals the bird food pretty much every day all winter as long as the feeder is stocked.

Here is the journaling:

Every day, usually late morning

Jasper will be on his box

and that tail will start to twitch rapidly.

He has spotted…  (The PIRATE)

  

The little squirrel may have only one eye, but he has it trained on our bird feeder just about every day.  Jasper may have both eyes fixed on our squirrel but that is as far as he goes.  It is up to us humans to chase him away or the birds will go hungry.  We let our little one eyed thief have some first.  Sometimes he scampers back to the woods, other times he just climbs back up the chimney and out the trumpet vine to try it all again.  This is his 2^nd or 3^rd winter with us.  He has even invited friends to his favorite fast food hangout.  Who can blame him?  Free and easy food.

For the page, I used Crate Paper's Acorn Avenue collection.  With a name like that you might except fall themed papers with lots of autumn leaves, little squirrels and plenty of gold and rust.  You'd be disappointed.  You wouldn't be though if you wanted versatile papers.  There are papers here for every season but the only acorns and squirrels are in the stickers and die cuts.

The squirrel die cut really didn't go with the papers so I used some white ink to tone him down a bit after a failed attempt at recoloring him.  Apparently I have as little control over paper squirrels as I have live ones.

For the title, I ripped off the top layer of these large chipboard letters and then painted on colors that matched my papers.

Lately, I've been seeing lots of triangles and arrows running up and down and across layouts.  For this one, I used a particular paper in the collection to get that effect.

This is one of those pages that makes me smile.  I'm very pleased with how it came out but more because it reminds me of the moment each day where Jasper and I went into little frenzy of acknowledging and then running off the squirrel.  Despite his theft, he is very cute and fun to watch so we hope to see him this fall.

Here's the video to watch at YouTube or here:


And here is this week's PDF file with sketch and tips.

Thanks for visiting today.  I hope you will return tomorrow as I am participating in a blog hop from the Counterfeit Kit Club blog.  I have a fun and different kind of layout.