Friends LO and new flower

Good morning!  I wanted to share with you a new layout that I made.  I took my children out a couple of weekends ago and took some pics of them and was pretty pleased with the results.  This one of Shelby and Elias just turned out great and may be one of those pics that you just have to scrap more than once.

My goal with this layout, besides completing several challenges, was to incorporate both the boy and girl aspects, so I've got my flowers and bling to represent Shelby, and stars and branches to represent Elias.

This was done for several challenges over at Scrapbook.com, one of which was scraplift the person before you and I chose to scraplift BJscrapsalot's layout All Done. 

Another challenge I made this for was the Do It Yourself challenge.  I created this flower, which I have named "Pinched Rose" for it.  The tutorial will be up on my blog as soon as I finish posting this.  I also am hosting my own challenge this month at scrapbook.com Blooms N Bling, Stars N Sparkles in honor of my new blog name.  Please feel to come join it!  I couldn't figure out how to incorporate stars, so I decided to tear the top and insert them in there. 

As part of the Do It Yourself challenge, the 2nd option was paper embellies with the twist of making Amarily's Mountain Lily.  These are really beautiful flowers and fun to make!   The leaves are a stamp set from Heartfelt Creations - Swirly leaf that I saw on Lisa Gregory's layouts and fell in love with.  They have some wonderful stamp sets that I really cannot wait to collect more!  On my leaves, I used Citrus and pearl mixative alcohol ink with blending solution, then around the edges I used a paintbrush and meadow green alcohol ink to outline them.  I then cut out the leaves by themselves.  I stamped the leafy swirls directly on my layout then glued the cut out leaves over the stamped image. 

Thanks for looking and I hope you have a wonderful day!