Hey these gears look just like flowers!

I have been scrapbooking my 8 year old daughter Hannah the longest since she is the oldest. The result is that I have become very good at scrapping with lots of ribbon and flowers and bling. When our second child Jack came along, I had to adopt blues and planes and cars.

While heavy equipment can be fun and there are a variety of blues, I have had the hardest time finding an embellishment the equivalent of flowers to use on my layouts.

That is, until I discovered painting chipboard! The bold shapes of chipboard are easily manipulated into masculine embellishments and paintable or coverable with paper in whatever cover suits your need!

In this recent layout, I used BoBunny's Grease Monkey collection of papers and cardstock stickers to create this layout of Jack in my husband Luke's kite boarding gear.

I used the orange paper for the background and was inspired by the white "painted" edges so I took the patterned pieces, cut them into smaller pieces, and edged them in white paint. I then took chipboard gear coasters by Maya Road and painted them coordinating colors of orange, blue, and green, let them dry, and added a distressed look with black dry brushed paint.

For additional dimension, I added foam squares to the back of cardstock stickers to lift them off the page. The orange letters for the title are traced with white gel pen to add some dimension to the title as well.

This page has the visual effect of floral embellishments, but with a masculine feel.