And who doesn't love chocolate?

This summer I met my great-nephew Max for the first time. He lives in Canada and family circumstances meant that he was already nearly 4 before he could come and visit. He is such a poppet - and very photogenic (when cleaned up!) He was only here for a few days but we took oodles of photos of him so expect to see a few layouts featuring the cutest Canuck ever.

On this day we went to the fab I Scream parlour in Brixham where I had a delicious lemon and chilli icecream  - my two favourite flavours! Max went for, well what he normally does. And why not?

 

When I saw this Glitz design paper I immediately thought of Max with the icecream dripping down his chin (and on his nose!).

I mounted the Finnley Drips paper on some Dapper Dan Chevron (which I had excavated the middle of first, don't want to waste a bit!)

Then layered it up with some Wild and Free Arrows which was border punched, along with a strip made of both sides of the October Afternoon Travel Girl, Plane Ticket.

When I started to arrange things on the page it was all a little too clean and if there is one thing that photo is not... so I grabbed an Imagine That arrow stamp and some Peeled Paint distress ink and created a border by pressing down really hard to start with, then normally and then didn't apply any more ink to the stamp.

I wanted to use some of those lovely chipboard cameras and decided that I would paint them. I thought I would experiment with using Gesso followed by Distress Stains. Not totally successful. The colours were a little too washed out but improved by brushing the same colour inks on top. It did leave a nice grainy feel however. As I utilised the two circles from the lenses as - well circles, I decided to make new lenses using vellum which also went behind the Freckled Fawn frame. 

Now that frame gave me a dilemma. It says "favorite". I wondered about leaving it there as Max is Canadian and you can spell it either way there (apparently). But I couldn't do it! So I covered it with one of the Elle Studio tags and used some of the letters that are included to go on the top of a Maya Road frame to spell "fave".

I put some spare white card stock from my stash behind the big and little frames. In the big one I wrote my journalling and in the small one I used an American Crafts Dear Lizzy Lucky Charm stamp roller, again trying to do the ombre thing with my stamping

For my finishing touches I used the alphabet with the kit along with a small Kesi'art alpha from a previous kit. I trimmed down some of the Dapper Dan Triangles which I combined with the middle of the "o"s on the sticker sheet. A little bit of Crate Paper washi (the green stripe) and a few little stick on gems from my enormous collection and I was done.
And in the mood for chocolate icecream...