Good Things Come To Those Who Wait

(This post is part of my Onwards and Upwards Blog Event)

Good morning! Today we’re starting with an adventure. Challenge #2 is now up at the Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog, and I thought I might have to blog my layout for it tomorrow. Then I realised it fits in just fine with the Onwards and Upwards theme, as it’s about travel, and about me achieving a long-held dream to be like a certain book character!

The challenge is to get inspired by your favourite children’s book! You can be inspired by the theme, cover, topic, style… I took several ideas from mine…

Halong Bay:

My page was inspired by my favourite children’s novel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader by C. S . Lewis.

I love this book so much. When I was about 7 or 8 I received the set of the Narnia Chronicles books, and I devoured them! This one was my particular favourite as I wanted to be Lucy, sailing on a ship in another world, seeing mermaids, dragons and other magical creatures. I’ve always loved the sea so the thought of travelling on a real adventure across the ocean really appealed to me!

I finally got to live the dream (a little) when I went travelling with my husband (then fiancée) about 7 years ago. We went on a trip through Halong Bay in Vietnam, and spent a night on a junk boat. It was all wooden and our cabin had a high wooden bed. We ate fish cooked straight from the sea, we glided past monolithic islands peppered with caves, and rowed a kayak over a jellyfish as big as mel. The next morning I was the first to wake up and I sat alone on the top deck – the mist was curling around the limestone karsts and I couldn’t hear anything apart from the low chugging of the engine propelling us onwards. Even the name ‘Halong Bay’ was perfect as it means ‘the bay of descending dragons’. I was in absolute heaven.

I wanted to get this magical feeling across on my layout, so I took several ideas from the Voyage of the Dawn Treader book.

First of all, there’s the part where the children are looking at a painting of a boat on the sea, and the painting comes to life and starts to escape the frame:

‘a great cold, salt splash had broken right out of the frame and they were breathless from the smack of it’.

So I used a Tando Creative ‘Sequin Waste’ mask to create some white circles spilling out from behind my photo and journaling areas. On the left of the page I used white acrylic paint, laying it on quite thickly so the circles blurred together, they look like underwater bubbles:

I used opaque white mist through the mask on the right of the page, to look more like sea spray:

I also remembered that Lucy has a sun on her dress in the book illustrations:

So I punched circles from some papers with a Martha Stewart Punch All Over The Page Pinking Circles punch, and tucked them in a few places. Finally, I used the mermaid background paper so the mermaid was at the bottom, as in the book their ship glides over some merpeople.

Writing this up makes me want to be back on that trip. One day we will go again. I’m good at waiting for things like that. We were suppossed to go to New Zealand on our trip then – it was the main part of the trip I was looking forward to – but we ran out of money and had to come home. We’ve still not been, and I know we won’t be able to go for at least 5 years more. But I don’t mind too much – as long as I can believe it will happen, and I have a rough idea when, then I can stand the wait. Good things come to those who wait.

Though I have to admit I’m not quite so patient when I’m waiting for new scrappy goodies to arrive!

Be Inspired:

Make a layout inspired by a book – I’ll be extra impressed if you use a detail from an illustration to inspire something

Write about a dream that has come true

Use one product in two different ways (for me it was the mask, but you could alter items, use a stamp in two different orientations/colours, etc

Remember that commenting on this post, and any other over this weekend, will count as an entry into the Grand Giveaway, but only if you’ve registered your interest in winning that prize right HERE!

See you again at 11am! x