This Is Paradise

This is paradise, the condo we rent for a week every summer (most years) on the Florida Gulf Coast.. For 51 weeks we anticipate the 7 days here. It's the perfect place, a small complex with my extended family renting several of the units. It's just footsteps to the white sand beach, even less to the beachside pool. All of the kids and the adults can gather for fun on the beach or for games inside (The Game of Things was a big hit this year!) and yet retire to our own units for meals and sleep. It is far enough away from the crowds of Destin, but close enough for shopping...on those rainy days of course. We can save a lot of money with a week of sunshine! With tropical storm Debby, this year was not such a week.

Here is a photo from a double red flag day, when the beaches were closed to swimmers:

Threatening skies meet threatening waves.

 A rainbow one evening ushered in a few days of sunshine:

A double rainbow!

 And tons of fun:

Catching Waves

The boy and his board were inseparable.

Pool Fun

I used the Paradise Beach collection to scrap a photo of our place in the sun. This line from Echo Park is quite interesting. There are two sides to each paper, and two distinct feels emanating from the set. One side of each sheet is deeply colored with the kind of subtle patterns that I love. I'll call it side B. The other side, side A, is more bright and playful, a fun look, but not always something I would choose. And yet, I fell in love with one of the side A papers...a paper with a scene no less! Here is how I used it:

This is Paradise!

One corner and the bottom side of the paper was dominated by the artwork already printed on the page, but it still left me a lot of room to play. I knew what I wanted along the top. Of course...a banner! But not your typical paper flag kind. I had bookmarked a page recently with flip flops strung across the top of a page and wanted to do something similarly fun. The sticker sheet in the collection gave me the perfect "toys" for creating such a banner. The images I chose were mounted on chipboard and strung across the page with baker's twine looping here and there and in and out of the punched holes. It was a perfect depiction of things we associate with our days at the beach.

The hard part was deciding on how to ground my picture. That's always tricky with such papers. I used a colorful strip of striped paper, an orange folder, and a wave sticker to tie them all together.

The grid design on the background paper made journaling easy...and straight.

The photo above is from our week in 2010. As soon as I finish editing all of this year's photos, I'll get busy with the rest of this great collection of papers.