Patience

 Here is Sketch #1 over at Scrapbook.com for the February Monthly Sketch Challenge.  Its beautiful, right?

 This is what my creative juices made from using the sketch.  I love this photo of my son sitting on the boat trying to fish when we went to the river with my brother and his partner in Oct 2015.

 I recently bought some nautical charms from amazon and they went right on to this page.  The seashells came from my old stash.  The paper was from the Prima Ledger Pack.  I used some burlap from Walmart behind the picture.  TIP: I pulled out quite a bit of the strings from the edges and pushed around some others that were left to make the burlap look a bit worn.

 The lighthouse was a sticker from Joann's.  The rub-on journaling was a bit old and really hard to transfer on to the paper.  I had to use a black pen to fill in the gaps.

 The die cuts were originally a brownish color.  TIP: I took some white gesso paint on my finger and rubbed over the die cuts to give it a light white wash look.  (I also did this on a few areas on the page itself for a softer background.)  I am not very keen on my handwriting so this definitely was not my favorite part of the page...but I had no alphas that would fit on those die cut pieces so I had no choice but to do it.

 I hand stitched around the entire page.  TIP: It is always best to sew before you glue anything together because once you glue the paper, it is extremely hard to push the needle through when you make the holes for your stitches.  When I glued the papers together, I added some cheesecloth pieces around the whole page.

I broke some pieces of a Dusty Attic fishnet chipboard to use here and there around the page and I left them raw.