Holiday papers used in the "off season"

I haven't often done it, but I do shop for holiday themed papers based on how useful they could be in a regular scrapbook page. Mostly because things that can't be used that way tend to be overly busy for my style. But at the end of the season I tuck them away and don't think about looking at those Christmas or birthday papers again for a long time. 

The second August challenge at My Mind's Eye was to bust those papers out and apply them to a project that is not what the paper was "designed" for. The DT used Christmas and Halloween papers which for some bizarre reason got me to thinking about my birthday papers and how awesome Hip Hooray would look with this Instagram picture of my guys playing together. 

Banners and tags are fairly common all year so it was mostly easy, I only had two real modifications. The back red paper has "Happy Birthday" strung with some of the blue banners so I had to sort of hide that. And then the "Make a" end with "Wish" so I covered it with a tag from the kit, added "train" and for safe measure tucked the word "Choo" under the edge. 

All the papers are from Hip Hooray, the thread is Lost and Found Union Square, and the blue ric rac was in my bin of MME ribbons but I don't remember which collection it's from. The eyelets are WRMK, tiny alphas are Jenni Bowlin, Thickers from American Crafts, Ranger Distress fired brick all over pretty much everything. A little machine stitching, foam dots, and paper rolling finished off the look of this page.

I'm also entering it in the Scrapbooksteals MWM - Pearl 6. Kristy Lee's sketch was a perfect fit for this collection!