Chip off the ol' block

This is the only LO I managed to squeeze in these past busy CNY weeks. I did not think it would take me long but infact it took me AGES. Reason being this is the only copy I have of this picture which although wasnt a good picture (had lots of stuff to crop out), I loved the focus of the picture which is my dad and bro chilling on the couch together. I dont know who took the picture or where the negatives are but I found it lying about the house one day and knew I just had to scrap it.

Chosing the pattern paper itself took sometime. Although I felt this stripy one from MM Fresh Anthology collection suited it, I tried to match it to something else but it didnt work. The green strip the heading is on is also from the same paper stack. I got the heading from a stack of vellum Family quotes I got from Scrapperholic. Buttons next to the heading were from Hokko. They had these little packs of coloured buttons from Japan which I thought were quite cute so I bought them in a few colours.

The picture was quite small after cropping so eventhough this was a 9" by 9", I knew I still had alot to cover. I found a similar matching blue from some paper I had bought from a bookstore (Shhh!) and cut a big semi circle I could do some journalling on. Now this is the hard part. I wanted to do those lovely zig-zaggy stitches I always see in the magazines (which I'm told is done using a sewing machine) but I dont have a sewing machine. So it was down to handmade poking of holes as equally apart as I could have them. I started with the blue paper (after I'd stuck it on) then poked holes on the pattern paper in between the holes I'd made on the blue paper. Sewing the zig zag into the ready made holes reminded me of cross stitching...I have been advised to try and incorporate this into my LO's....but anyway...ya I take ages at stitching. I then had this big gap to fill at the bottom. Before deciding to put the blue semi circle, I had tried out my foam stamps (my first venture into stamping btw) and they looked good so I've incorporated them into this LO.

Lastly, I had some keropok n stuff on an ugly side table I wanted to cover in the photo hence the dyed tag from the Fresh Anthology collection again. I covered the tag with crackle medium after I wrote on it. I think crackle medium works best on darker colours though cos you need to take a closer look to notice it. So that's my LO. It took me almost the whole afternoon to make and I more or less pulled out all the stuff I had to make sure everything was right. Its probably the longest I've ever spent on an LO. I knew I couldnt use flowers cos the macho-ness of the male form lazed out on the couch just wouldnt have carried off flowers. I'm quite happy with how its turned out now really...Yay!!