Surprise!

We wanted to make this party easy on my not so mobile 90-year old Dad...so we threw him a surprise party at his own house! All the details were planned in secret with my sisters and brother. Everything was hush-hush. Then on the big day we all just started showing up...with food, decorations, and more food. It was quite the surprise.

I ended up with (3) 4x6 photos that I wanted to scrap together, groupings of my dad with his grandkids, his children, and our accompanying spouses. I went with a design that I like to refer to as building blocks. The three photos are placed one on top the other along one edge, with a border strip (or two). Then I start layering patterned paper. It's like stacking blocks, or with them askew...tumbling blocks!  There's a substantial base, but as you go up the papers become narrower, less cluttered with embellishment, and more of the background peeks through. 

But did you notice? My photos do the opposite! The busier photo on the top would have competed too much with the heavily embellished block on the bottom right. Consequently, I placed the photo with the fewest people in that bottom left spot and the busiest up top. Much better.

It is so fun to decorate a page when you have as many happy embellishments as there are in the Scraptastic Celebration kits-an embellishment gold mine. In fact, I had to restrain myself as not to overwhelm the eye.

Check back tomorrow for a non-birthday page scrapped with the same Scraptastic kit. It's a favorite of mine!