25 Years...

My sister Kim and her husband Jeff, and my brother Barry and his wife Joanne celebrated their 25th wedding anniversaries this  year.  25 years - that is something to celebrate.

We had a little party when we were all together in August and I wanted to make them something special to commemorate the occasion.

I had really enjoyed making the frame at Leonie's workshop and decided to start with that.  I ordered two of the cardboard frames and did the base decoration using pretty much the same method we'd used at the workshop.  To personalise the background I used Craft Artist to print recent photos of the happy couples on the patterned paper I was using.  I tore the paper, pasted it all together, did some random stamping and painting, and finished it off by stamping their names in the corner.

For each frame I cut out a picture of the happy bride and groom on the day and made it glossy with triple thick embossing powder.  I put a small box behind the picture before attaching it so that it would be raised about 1/4 inch from the back of the frame.

Then I started planning how I would finish decorating the whole thing....

Well, I say 'planning' but really it was about two weeks of trying different ideas and layouts and embellishments before I finally settled on the final configurations.  I don't know how other people do these things but I tend to try a layout, and then ponder it a bit.  Then I move things a little, take some stuff off, put other stuff on....and then ponder a bit more.  I then repeat this a lot.

My original idea was to have a tag with '25 years' on it, and the key hanging off of it.  And I thought that the bottle would end up sitting in the recess of the frame.

But after trying a few variations the tag just wasn't working for me - and my best friend pointed out that a picture of the kids was  essential. (She also tried to convince me to add a dog biscuit to Barry and Joanne's but I just ignored her on that one!)

So I found photos of the girls, cut them out in Craft Artist and put them on neutral backgrounds.  I put the pictures into Memory Keepers frames. I didn't like the original shiny coppery colour so I added some pewter gleam to tone it down a bit.

The keys are Tim Holtz embellishments - and I love them.  They are lovely, heavy proper keys.  One says 'Heart' and the other 'Memory' - unfortunately that's a bit tricky to see in these photos.

The bottle sitting in the centre with the wedding picture was all wrong and so I needed a new way to incorporate it - because I had become really really attached to the idea of including the wedding date as a message in the bottle.  But how????

While thinking that through I decided the frame needed a bit of colour to finish it off - and after a bit of faffing around I ended up creating the fabric heart and buttons on the wire.

Of course the string of buttons needed some sort of anchor and it suddenly seemed obvious that the bottle should be held on the frame with the wire.

I went through about a thousand different lace strips, in a thousand different placements.  With bows, without bows... I tried them all before settling on this simple cream lace.

And I lost count of the number of times I put the corners on and took them before FINALLY deciding I liked them and gluing them down.

I wrapped them in plain tissue paper tied up with a bright purple ribbon and I'm pleased to say they were really well received on the day.

Phew.