A Mother's Pride.

Our latest challenge was to gather inspiration from Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. As a HUGE British literature fan I have read this book many times and seen the film almost as much. So for this post I wanted to go past the oh so obvious love story and into some of the other minor topics that Austen so loved to put into her books. She was very outspoken writer of her time and her commentary on the local society of the time mixed with much irony made her one of the most read authors of British literature. She herself was from a very close nit family and credits their continued support in making her the person and writer she was. (Plus, I already did a British lit. layout, and most recently a love story layout.) So I focused on the pride and the family support. As well as the quote in the book from Miss Lucas.

I am most proud of my boys. And they are all proud to be Boy Scouts. As all scout parents know it takes a lot of continued support to help the scouts move through their ranks and become the incredible young men that can proudly call themselves a Boy Scout. ( Lord Baden Powell brought to America, from England the idea of a code of honor of Scouting for boys.)

I started by selecting the photos I wanted to use and then changing them all to a sepia tone to give them an aged look.

I have some wonderful paper in my collection that is very reminiscent of the fabrics in the 19th century. So with both of these elements in hand I chose Mosaic Moments grid paper in Ivory and got to work. I felt that the pics in sepia needed something so that they didn't fade into the background so I dug through my Mosaic Moments paper tiles and chose the Kilarney color. (just a note: sometimes, like this time, even though the paper tiles come with 55 tiles you may not always have the size you are looking for, but you can cut a larger tile down to the size you need. So don't be discouraged that their are not enough 3 2/8 x 5 4/8 available.)

With my journaling pieces I first printed them out on plain copy paper and then cutting the paper tile to the size I wanted, centered it over the text and ran it back through the printer.

I added the Fleur de Lis in gold, to add some decoration to the page since gold accents were popular in the late 19th century and the Fleur de Lis is the universal symbol for Boy Scouts. I also did some hand scrolling in the margins, which was also a popular style for the time to decorate documents.