Garden Gate Layout

Yesterday, the Spellbinders blog featured my Garden Gate layout!  Thanks, Holly, for the great post!

Here's the layout.......

The first time I saw the new Spellbinders Motifs and Accents sets, I immediately thought of a wrought iron fence.  That idea and my photo were my inspiration for this layout.  

The photo is a portion of one of my gardens that I created on a sloped portion of our yard that was very hard to mow.  I set every one of the rocks to make a wall about 18-24" high along the slope. I worked on it about 3 years.  Most of the garden is perennials that don't require much care.  The plants are well established now and tumble over the rock wall in places.  Some of the plants self seed including the Gallardia (red and yellow flowers) and Spurge (blue green foliage).  It's always a surprise to see where they come up each year!

Back to the layout......

Most of the pieces for the fence and gate are from Spellbinders S5-034 Parisian Accents set.  I also used the S5-032 Elegant Posts set for the posts and hinges and latch on the gate.  The top on the gate is from S5-043 Fleur de Lis Motifs. 

I'm not going to share all the directions here.  You can find them all on the Spellbinders blog here. 

I thought you might like to see how I put the fence and gate together. 

Here are all the pieces cut from black card stock

For the gate, I simply layered the Parisian Motif piece over the Lattice Rectangle with Labels Eighteen cutout and glued in place.  I slipped the Fleur de Lis piece over the top of gate and glued it in place.  I trimmed the bottom edge of the posts, as indicated in the photo, to be straight. 

For the hinges and latch, I used just a short part of the small Elegant Posts pieces.  I trimmed them after I aligned the gate with the fence.  Each one has a piece of acetate or clear packaging glued to the back to make it more resilient when the gate is opened to see the journaling.

I've only shown a few of the strips for the fence in the upper photo.  I cut enough 1/8" strips to go all across the Parisian Motifs piece.  You can see in the photo below how I aligned them for gluing. I used my guillotine paper trimmer to cut them all even before adding the bottom piece. 

Once the fence was assembled, I decided where I wanted the gate on my layout.  Then I cut the fence in two pieces.  I laid the post over the fence and trimmed the fence to fit under the scrolls of the post.  I fastened the gate to the post with the hinge pieces.  I added the latch to the other side of the gate and trimmed it to tuck under the post when it's closed.  Once I had the fence glued in place on my layout, I trimmed the ends that  extended beyond the edges of the page. 

The gate has a piece of the yellow paper glued behind it to hide the journaling.  When it's closed it looks as if there's nothing behind it!   I used a small piece of text paper to write my journaling.  The complete directions for all of the layout are on the Spellbinder blog post.

I hope I've given you some ideas for using the Parisian Motifs, Lattice Rectangles, and Elegant Posts.  Thanks for visiting! 

-judy