Happy Birthday *U*S*A*

Oddly enough, I've been working on a couple of summer themed scrapbook pages with a winter-themed scrapbook kit...and it works! Scraptastic always gives the choice of two kits, and I could have chosen the kit without a decidedly winter feel, but the Sweater Weather kit appealed to me in other ways. 

For one, it includes a couple of exclusive Scraptastic patterned papers, two of which have that elusive true blue in their color scheme. In fact, it's the red, white, and blue in many of the papers that gave me the idea to scrapbook this 4th of July picture with the kit:

To reinforce the theme of my page, an American flag cut file was duplicated along the bottom of the background paper and small stars were stamped along the top, along with larger punched stars. 

I love the look of kraft with red, white, and blue:

As you might have noticed, I employed pen stitching throughout this page: around the lighter punched stars, on the tags, and around each of the flag motifs:

There you have it! A kit designed for cool weather beautifully scrapped my summer photo, where the only "snow"...is in the SNOWballs. ;)