A Chicago Trip and a tutorial!

*I WILL GO AHEAD AND WARN YOU NOW.. THIS IS A VERY LONG POST BECAUSE I AM POSTING FOR TWO DESIGN TEAMS AND ONE IS A TUTORIAL!!!

Good morning everyone! It is Thursday and I have so much to share with you!! First of all, Sketches in Thyme has a new sketch for you!!

I decided to do some pictures from my recent trip to Chicago! I know... I should have been home packing, after all, the movers are coming in 15 days!! But, it was Emmy's (my neice's) 5th birthday and we wanted to celebrate it right! So, my sister and I drove to Chicago with Lauren and Emmy! We stayed right on Magnificent Mile and had a blast!! Unfortunately we did not get much grown up shopping done.... it was all geared toward the girls! We did go to the American Girl Store and had lunch in their cafe, went to Navy Pier(had to ride the ferris wheel!) , rode in taxi (major highlight for the girls!), ate at Rainforest Cafe, and hit the Lego and Disney stores!

I do have another LO that goes with this one (can't show it until tomorrow!) so all of my journaling is on that one! This one I kept pretty simple! Here is a close up of the flowers....

They were made from vellum and I just folded them over and inked them! I thought they added a unique feature to the page!!

And here is the sketch I started with....

The sketch is by Helen Croft at scrapalittlesketches.com

Do you want to see what you are playing for? If you submit a project during the month of August, you will be put into a drawing to win this prize:

Our lovely Maven Fern was so generous to donate this!! Wouldn't you like to win?! Well, you have to play along!! Stop by the Sketches In Thyme blog and see what the rest of the Design Team did for you.... truely amazing!!

SHE'S A SASSY LADY POST!!
I am also guest Designer at She's a Sassy Lady today!! Sheila is so sweet to let me post on her blog once a month!!  This time I am going to show you a tutorial on how to make the circle flowers on this layout! This is a picture of me with my two sisters. I will go ahead and apologize now for the lighting on these pictures! The reds really do match better IRL than they are showing up in this photo!

I started out by picking 4 coordinating pieces of cardstock and cutting them into 6 in. x 6 in. squares and placing them on my Cricut mat.

Next, I used my Gypsy and the Mini Monograms cartridges to make some circles. The sizes I used were 3 in, 2 1/4 in, 1 1/2 in. and 3/4 inch. I layered the circles on top of each other and I was not really careful about getting each one perfectly centered because I kind of liked that they were not perfect circles!

Here are the circles once they were cut.....

I took each circle and distressed it with my Tim Holtz distresser. If you don't have one, you could use scissors instead. I was very messy with this process and tried to bend and "wear down" the paper as I went. I did not want it to be perfect and stiff.

After they were all distressed, I inked them with a red ink.

I started with one of the larger circles, a piece of white cardstock and a glue gun. I glued the first circle to the cardstock, making sure to bend and fold as I went. I like using the circle rings instead of solid circles because I think they bend better when doing this part.

For the next layer, I decided to use ribbon instead of paper.

You continue the process until you have completed the flower.

Once the flower is complete, I used my scissors to cut flower off the card stock leaving a white cardstock circle as the base....

You can see the white cardstock circle base in this photo. To add another layer and make a lacey edge on the flower, I used my hot glue gun to glue the lace to the back of the flower.

When I flipped it over, this is what I had. (And yes, this is a different flower from the one I started with at the beginning of the tutorial. I made several of them, but this is the one I added lace to the back of!)

I added a pearl button to the center of the larger flower and just a pearl sticker to the smaller flower. I also used some Prima roses to add to the flower "bunch".

And that is everything! How simple were those to make?! And here it is again on the final layout!

Thanks for stopping by and reading this very long post with a lot of photos!! Please stop by She's a Sassy Lady and check it out! Sheila has a whole team of designers who keep the fresh ideas coming!! I am always learning something new there!! Have a great Thursday and thank you for taking the time to comment! I really do appreciate hearing what you have to say!!