XOXO Challenge #32: A Challenge of Olympic Proportions

Olympics!! It's all over this house...the kids are begging to watch the coverage, and at night, they hold their own Olympics in the backyard. Their gymnastics routine wasn't exactly up to real Olympic standards, but cute to watch, and their Olympic soccer and yes, even bean bag toss, was almost exciting. I remember being young and thinking how amazing it would be to represent the US at the Olympics (that is, if I had an athletic bone in my body...besides running for fun and volleyball, I really wasn't that good at much else.) It's so great to see my kids get excited, and I think they've all decided to start swimming competitively...after they work on their strokes a bit first, of course! Patryk just had his first year of swim lessons, but already wants to start diving competitively (HA!). I love the dreams the Olympics inspires in all children, whether they compete or not.

At XOXO this month, we want you to be inspired by the Olympics yourself. Is it the rings, whether their shape or color? Is it the games themselves, creating for example a layout with pics from a sporting event? Show us how the Olympics inspire one of your layouts for a chance to become a guest designer! We are pretty fun to hang with on our Facebook page, I must admit ;-)

Ok...so I had received my July Scraptastic kits when I sat down to do this, and the colors of the Summer Picnic kit turned on the creative lightbulb. The colors in the Simple Stories Summer Fresh line screamed Olympics! I mean, seriously...

I then decided to use my rarely used Fiskars Shape Cutter and the circle template to cut the pictures which I arranged in Olympic ring-style. This is a great technique to put a lot of pics on a page that might include shots taken from a distance. Rather than keep all that useless background space, you can cut the important part out, making it easier to focus on the people and objects the layout is about.

 Passport Mister Huey, the free goodie for being a subscriber :)

 Love these Little Yellow Bicycle felt flowers with burlap leaves...they are in the add-on (which is unfortunately sold out!!)

 Sassafrass flowers: had to include them. They just matched so perfectly!

 A fun twine circle, made with the help of glue dots.

Don't forget to head over and submit your own Olympic project. Can't wait to see it! You have until the end of the month to play along.

We're off on our camping adventure Sunday morning, wish me luck and let's hope there's no rain! 5 people stuffed in a camper all week does NOT sound like much fun.

xoxo
Khristen