Guinea Pig

What awful weather, I don't think I've ever seen so much rain in June! We are supposed to be going to a barbecue tomorrow but I think we'd get washed away if we tried. Its so dark and stormy that I struggled to get a decent shot of my layout in the early afternoon, but here is the best of a bad lot.

The layout is called Guinea Pig and is of course about our 3 guinea pigs, Tickle, Merry and Tiddler. We are definitely more cat people in my family (you get loads of cuddles but don't have to clean them too much) but the guinea pigs were our foray into other types of pets. We had more luck with them than Ed did when he was young, his guinea pigs apparently used to die off pretty quickly. Tickle managed to clock up a good 5 years which is a ripe old age for a guinea pig.

I chose to use red for this layout, mainly because my brother is wearing a bright red jumper in the picture and there aren't many other colours that will tone in with that! However, I managed to soften it a bit by using Basic Grey Blush papers. I created my own flower embellishments by stamping using my Autumn Leaves stamps (I also added swirls to the background) and the other flowers are by Papermania and Prima. As I said earlier in the week, I have found a new love for chipboard so created my title using Basic Grey and Heidi Swapp letters which I painted.

The journalling is on a pull out card behind one of the photos. It reads:

We had begged Mum and Dad to let us have some guinea pigs, and when our Grandad built us a cage they finally agreed. We had three guinea pigs in total - Tickle, Merry and little Tiddler. And as poor Mum had feared, she did end up cleaning them out!

I am less comfortable with these multi photo layouts but I'm not unhappy with the result. I think you have to cut back on some of your patterned paper and embellishments thought as otherwise it feels like you are overloading the page. I still definitely prefer single photo layouts but I'm going to force myself to break out of my comfort zone a bit more in the future.