A Leaving Gift

Anyone who follows me on my 'other blog' will know that I am flying over to UK on Thursday of this week, primarily to attend the funeral of my sister. But before that, I am spending a week with my middle son who is leaving for a new life in Denmark, the following weekend. I will be helping him to leave his current flat in a clean and tidy state, so that, with a bit of luck, he will get his deposit back! On Sunday his brothers have organised a family lunch for him, which I will now be able to go to. I love it when we all get together. I wanted to make a little gift for Tom to let him know he is not forgotten, so I put together this frame.

I started off with a digital scrapbook kit called Timeless Romance from Alexis Design Studio at Digichick, and opened up a background paper. I made it several degrees lighter. (I made all of this except the script in Adobe Photoshop).The main images of Tom himself, us as his parents and the full family group at the base, are all added full colour, and then each of his brothers, some with their partners, are added down the sides as lighter images. I clipped each photo to an artistic photo mask, to take away any strong edges and make them blend together better. The masks come from a variety of digital scrap sites, bought over the passed couple of years and stored on my computer. I then had two empty corners which I filled with flower embellishments from the same digi scrapbook kit as the paper. When it was done, I flattened all the layers and saved it as a jpeg file.

Next I opened publisher and imported the image, resizing it to exactly fit into a basic clip frame. I am not a great fan of these, but it was the best on offer in my local shops here.

I then opened the script in my silhouette cameo soft ware. I bought it as a ready-made cutting file from the silhouette store. I sized it to fit the centre of my picture and cut it from black vinyl. I weeded out the unwanted pieces and used transfer tape to position it onto the page. I was wary of lifting the print with the transfer tape so I de-stickied it (?) by pressing it onto my arms first, and it worked fine. I had to re-cut the word 'WHERE' because I tore it first time around, but other than that, it all worked just fine.

I hope he likes it as a little reminder of the family while he is away. I am sure we will still see him out here in Spain for holidays, and back in UK for work sometimes. He has spent almost a year commuting between offices here and in Denmark, so I am sure he will occasionally have to do the same in reverse. And of course, I feel a holiday in Denmark coming on, once he is nicely settled there!