Unless - PS layout

I'm so excited about this month's Practical Scrappers layout sketch, this layout was a work of love. But before I get into that, here's the sketch that Christine worked up for us: 

And my layout, you can definitely see where I paid homage to the sketch but let it take it's own course. 

So here's the story. A couple of weekends ago I was teaching a class about using the border strips and skinny scraps based on this layout I made ages ago. I can't believe I didn't blog about it, but I can't find the post so here it is: 

The class had been scheduled closer the to creation date and was rescheduled because of poor attendance (fall is a busy season in the midwest, who knew!?). Well, I'm sitting there watching the ladies piece their scraps together and decided that I needed to do a layout with the strips at an angle and stick to a mostly monochromatic scheme. They were pretty excited about horizontal stripes, you can only imagine how that process went down!

While we were working I asked about classes they'd like to see in the future. They specifically mentioned using some mixed media type techniques on layouts. Well, I sort of felt that the page needed something to help unify all my strips even further so while they were sewing down their pieces I set to work adding modeling paste. The white paste was a little stark on some of the strips so I misted it with two shades of yellow, since most of the papers were yellow and because the first yellow was waaaaaaay to yellow and I needed to mute it a bit. 

It was all a bit to yellow still once dry so I also rubbed a distress ink pad, probably walnut stain, across the top. That made it so much better. The page was to warm and sunny for the snowy pictures I'd packed so I was excited to see that these ones about our tree had weaseled themselves into the stack. 

The story about the tree: the city had to cut down the only tree in our part of the apartment complex, it was growing so into the lines that by the time they cut out the parts necessary to trim the problem spots the tree was basically a large stick in the ground. The boys had watched the process through their window. When they started to cut the trunk itself, well, Vance got really mad. You see, we let him watch The Lorax, and in the movie/book cutting trees is bad. Period. They never deal with sustainability practices of using what you have and planting more as you go, so I had to explain all those parts to him. Again. While I finally talked him out of his frustration, I was sad because the tree was really pretty and provided tons of shade in the summer. For our safety we weren't allowed out there while the crew was working, so when the crew went home for the night I went out and got a couple of pictures of the trunk pieces. The stump reminded me of the "Unless" thing that the Lorax leaves behind and I knew then that I had my title for this layout. 

See, so lots of fun to make the layout AND it was a story that I really wanted to tell.