Let's go fly a kite

I can't believe a week has gone by and I've not made any posts on here!  It's not that I haven't been busy making things because I have - perhaps too busy making and not enough uploading.  Hey Ho, such is life.  Anyway I'll start this week with a layout I made over the weekend.

The weekly challenge last week was set by Jen of Wear Crafts and it was a very unusual one - this is what we had to do:-

One of my new croppers was struggling with starting points for her layouts and then looking for ways to improve her work... which made me think hard about my scrapping process... so I realised, I adopt a kind of 'Good, Better, Best' approach.

I start off with 'Good' - basic shapes from paper arranged in a pleasing manner with co-ordinating colours, photo placed and title/journaling located.

Then, I do 'Better' - take quick photo of placement and remove all the bits to ink edges, add glitter, embossing or whatever to the basic shapes, refer to the photo and glue everything down.

Finally, I do 'Best' - add all the extra embellishments... clips, buttons, ribbons, icons, ink squirts ... whatever I want to add.

I could stop at any one of these points and have a nice layout... 'Good' would be simple and graphic... 'Better' would be distressed or defined... 'Best' would be whistles and bells and bling!

Now it is over to you... show us your 'Good, Better, Best'

These are my three stages:-

The first stage is quite plain and the buttons haven't been sewn on.  It hasn't got a title but as it's going in a holiday PL album I wasn't too bothered as the other photos taken at the same time would be along side with some journalling.

Some paint splatters and a different arrow on the left and I put a title on!

The finished result, buttons with twine and some other little embellies I stamped and cut out.  

A close up of the buttons - I just love them, they are like red mother of pearl buttons, mmm...lush

Finally, and I can't believe I forgot this, but I used Sue's fab sketch which you will find below: