Windsome Eyes

Happy New year! I am going to as of this date, and my first Layout of 2009, upload all of these to my blog as well as the descriptions.
This is my beautiful darling daughter on a wonderful day out on the lake. She loves the camera and was posing for me while we were out on the boat. The trip was so wonderful. We spent the weekend with dear friends and our little family.
I was inspired by a challenge on Scrapbook.com for this Layout. It is a great weekly challenge I participate in a lot so you will hear me mention it over and over again on this blog. The Challenge for this week was the start of a new round of the ABC challenge. Each week three letters of the alphabet are used to inspire three elements of a LO. They could be a technique or a shape or anything the hostes can think of that would be used on a LO. This weeks letters were ABC:

• A – Alphabet, you must use letters as embellishments on your layout. You must use at least five random letters, but there is no max limit. The letters cannot spell a word. (Your title and journaling do not count.) - Letters Used are STZGF All in and around the flowers and flourishes.
• B – Black, you must use paper with the color black on it. - I used an embossed black for the two circles behind the pic corners.
• C – Chalk, you must use chalk in some way on your layout. - This is not my best chalking job but I used them in my LO by taking a light brown chalk to the flowers to tone them down so they coordinate better with the PP I chose.

The title was inspired by another challenge called Word of the month Challenge for Jan - the word is:

• Winsome (win-some): – adjective - sweetly or innocently charming; winning; engaging: a winsome smile.

The journaling reads:
Your eyes glisten like the sun on the ... breaking waves of Lake New Hogan, CA.

The Details:
Top Right:
The background was created with a black marble rub-on from EK Success. Here in the pic you can see the detailing of the large flower/alpha cluster. These alphabets are from the Target 1$ bin for their valentine line. The flowers are also 1$ from the dollar store and the gold brad centers are from Stampin' up. The gold flourishes were cut from a 3" wide christmas ribbon left over from a present.

Bottom left:
In This detail you can see the secondary patterned paper from a costco paper pack. This shape was free handed with three sides shaped like the brackets {}. I perfer to freehand a lot of my shapes to customise the size of them as well as making my layouts unique to me. I inked the edge of it with a navy blue. You can also see in this pic the smaller flower cluster. This is Created the same way as the larger one just placed to bring your eye down to the title. The "windosme" was created by inking chipboard black and blinging it up with a few blue stars. I also used my favorite pen ever... the Zig Painty gold and silver oil pen. This was just to soften up the edges of these leters.

Bottom Right:
Here you can see the black embossed paper that was used to qualify this layout for the ABC challenge. I lightly ran a gold inkpad over the top of it to catch the embossed design and give it a litte glimmer. It was then outlined with the Zig Painty. Also notice the picture was framed with a blue and white ric rack.

Thank you all for looking I hope you enjoyed it.

Update: This LO won the ABC challenge 1st place. Top 3 in the Jan Rub-on challenge out of 38.