JOY frame

Hello and Happy, happy December! The Magnolia-licious team has our monthly project challenge for you as well as some inspiration which may help you get started! You can find all this on the Magnolia-lcious Highlites Blog
If you hang around just a few minutes I'll show you a little of my process as I approached this "new to me" project!

Here's the finished frame! Sorry that I couldn't get a good photo.

I decided on a short word-JOY-first. I bought a 5x7" picture frame at Kohl's. Then I cut 2 sizes of letters from construction paper at school (from the Ellison machine). I had NO IDEA what kind of layout I would be using!

Next I chose a couple of stamps from the Merry Christmas 2010 collection. I TRIED to arrange my letters and the stamps to work in the frame. No luck! I just couldn't get any balance to my design. It had to be one stamp centered. I hope everyone can tell the word is JOY!

The photo above is the paper that comes in frame and it gave me the idea to do a border.

I decided that the outside would be one inch strips and measured all accordingly. I knew where to place them because I had take the glass out of the frame and traced the size the piece needed to be on Kraft card stock.

Once the pieces were laid on I KNEW I had to sew them in place and would have a patchwork quilt!

Here is my colored image (beautiful Tilda with hanging star- #3083). she is place with the trial construction paper letters.

I finally cut the letters from banana card stock, stamped them in banana ink with the linen background stamp from SU and did fake stitching on them. No way could I stitch them for real!

And a finished close up so you can see that she does have some sparkle!
If you got through all this, Thanks!

Have a great day!

Cheryl