Q & L - a new challenge from the Craft Barn

Hi, thanks for stopping by.  Today saw the launch of the 2014 Craft Barn blog challenge.  This year, the challenge is Q and L - Quotes and Lyrics.

Each fortnight, you get a prompt of two words.  You can choose whatever kind of project you want, but you have to include either or both, of the words, and they have to be from a quote or a song lyric.  Today's prompts were "Smile" and "Up"

I "just happened" to see some half  price Moleskine notebooks in a bookshop yesterday which at about 9 x 11 inches, are a handy sort of size for a long-term project... there will be plenty of spare pages left at the end of the year too... so I popped back out and bought them today (luckily they were still there, as there was only one set)

So, I searched through some stamps and came across one on a Dyan Reaveley word set which included a "smile" quote.  I set to googling to see if I could find the source of this quote and eventually found it attributed to an Anthony J DAngelo..

I started by clear embossing some daisies (Jo Firth-Young for Paperartsy) as I had an idea I could use some kind of resist effect over the page.  However, the pages in the notebook are quite thin, so I decided to use my Portfolio Pastels again, (loved used them on my last post so much) - blending them with my finger.  This still looked quite scribbly.... but I persevered

 and when I heat set the page they seem ok (ish) now!  I stamped my quote and cut it into individual strips, and stuck it to the page.

The flowers seemed a bit non-descript from the clear embossing, till I remembered that in my Inktense pencils, was an outliner pencil, so I went round the petals with that...and I think they show up better now.

Thanks for looking, and thanks to the Craft Barn for what I think will be another tough but fun year of challenges!