Precious Moments - The Final Challenge at The Paper Mixing Bowl

I'm sad to say that this May's challenge will be the final challenge at The Paper Mixing Bowl. We've been doing challenges for a little over a year now and I just haven't seen the participation increase to any extent. Due to other DT commitments (and my desire to have some sort of personal life beyond scrapping), I just cannot justify the time for something that isn't generating significant interest or participation.

I want to thank everyone who has played along with our challenges - I hope they have inspired you just a bit.

To my wonderful Design Team - as you already know, my decision to end The Paper Mixing Bowl was extremely difficult because you have all been so wonderful and inspiring. Please accept my sincere gratitude and appreciation for all you have done for the PMB!

In May, we celebrate Mother's Day - so this month's recipe challenge had a 'mother' theme. I chose to scrap a photo of myself with my son when he was just three-days old. I've used gorgeous Pion Designs papers for this layout. 

Here is the recipe card for the May challenge:

I found these colours hard to find in my stash - they aren't my usual colour palette at all - but I loved the soft tones of the Pion papers and was able to bring in some of each colour in the papers and flowers. I started out by splattering the base page with watered-down acrylic paint in Antique White - it worked as a tone-on-tone witht the paper, so doesn't show well in the photos but is visible in real life. I have trouble with 'hearts' - I don't love using them - so I altered the sketch and just did some layering of papers in place of the heart design. I machine-stitched each of the layered papers (with the exception of the tags). I used a light teal pearl flourish (ZVA creative) and pearl-centred flowers to bring in the pearl element of the recipe. 

The title is a chipboard title by Imaginarium Designs - I've used it plain on this layout as I thought the plain chipboard looked so lovely with the soft colours and brown tones in the papers.

 I fussy cut butterflies from the Pion papers and layered them to create the 3D butterflies. I added a large frayed bow to the large fussy-cut tag that I used as the mat for the picture. I love how the bow frames the top of picture and how the frayed edges tie in with the stitching.

 I also fussy cut some tags from the Pion papers, layered them and added some frayed cotton to the end to tie in with the stitching and the bow on the layout.

Thanks for stopping by my blog today. I hope you'll pop by The Paper Mixing Bowl blog to play along with our final challenge and say goodbye!