Once Upon A... Sketch :)

So the September 15th challenge for Once Upon A... Sketch. :) It took me a really long time to figure out exactly what I wanted to do with the picture I used for this challenge, because it's very special to me. Here is the sketch:

The extra challenge was two lines of journaling directly on your photo. And here is the page I came up with:

This is a picture of my Pa and I when I was about ten years old. It's one of my very favorites! I knew that this picture deserved a very special page, and so I waited for a long time, collecting the right papers, and making my own embellishments. :) The journalling on the photo says "There's an alligator in the pool". It was always kind of an inside joke with Pa and I, and when deciding what I wanted on the picture, I knew this was perfect.
Here are some close ups:

I cut these letters from a paper I thought complemented the green in the main paper, and I hope they look alright because I did them freehand without a stencil or anything. :) I think they turned out good. :)

I made this flower out of fabric, with the intention of pulling out the blue in both papers, the lettering on the photo, and the blue in Pa's coveralls. After the flower was finished, I used some glitter paint to add some "dimension" to the petals. The edges frayed a little bit, but I really like the overall look.

To emphasize the red in the paper and the photo, I cut my journalling tag out of red cardstock. :) As you can see below the journalling, I glued thread in the same shade as the flower and the journalling on the photo to the page. It was quite the happy accident actually!! :D I had been thinking of doing something else with the thread, but it wasn't working out, so in a moment of creative frustration I tossed the thread onto the page, and it landed so... beautifully across the bottom. It was amazing! So I tweaked it a tiny bit, added some glue dots, and was very happy with the look! I put butterfly stickers on one end, and a button on the other (this is a picture of the thread at the top of the page:

So, that's the page. :) I am proud of it. And I think that in all my hopes of wanting the perfect page to display this photo that I treasure, I didn't have to try so hard to make it perfect. It was perfect all along, all by itself because it's a perfect memory.