America The Beautiful

Our first challenge for July was to use a patriotic song as the inspiration for a page. I started thinking about the pictures I might use and knew pretty quickly that I wanted to use America The Beautiful. We have taken some wonderful pictures on our trips down South.

For the large background pictures, I used a photo of the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee. The three smaller pictures are of a waterfall in Georgia on the Turnpike, a picture of Shore Drive in Virginia Beach, Virginia from the beach behind our favorite restaurant, Duck Inn, and a picture of one of the trees in my neighborhood after a snowfall.

For embellishments I decided to adapt a folded star pattern to paper. For the banner below the title, I used 1" squares and folded in two edges. For the actual star embellishments on each side of the title, I used 1" by 1/2" pieces and folded in two edges to make triangles (by cutting off the other half, it cut some of the bulk). I then cut the gold circles using Spellbinders dies on my Cuttlebug.

First, adhere four white triangles to a 3"x3" base.

Next, attach four blue triangles to the white triangles.

Attach four more blue triangles in between the first four blue triangles.

Next, add eight red triangles next to each of the blue triangles

I was going to stop there,  but when I cut the circles out of the gold cardstock with my die cutter, there was too much space left, so I added eight white triangles to the red ones.  I then added the gold circle cut from gold cardstock. Then, using scissors, I cut around the circle.

The finished embellishment!