Stick It Down - Kaiservilla

I'm rubbish at composing double pages, so I almost always use a sketch. One of my favourite sites for double page sketches is Stick It Down, and I had the sketch archive there bookmarked long before I joined the (single page) design team. 

While we were in Austria last summer, we visited the spa town of Bad Ischl and also Kaiservilla, the summer home of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz Joseph. We took plenty of photos, enough for a double page to be necessary, and of course I'm using the current sketch from Stick It Down. I swapped the two photos on the left side for one larger one, and made my stripey paper panels a bit longer so that they reached the middle of the page and I didn't have a gap between the two halves of my layout. I had plenty of journalling, and used paper strips for it in three places around the page.

The assassination of Franz Joseph's nephew and heir Franz Ferdinand was one of the triggers for the First World War, and we visited on the 100th anniversary of Austria-Hungary declaring war on Bosnia. Franz Joseph's war manifesto is preserved under glass on the desk in his study and it was odd to stand there exactly 100 years later in a room which is completely unchanged while the world outside has changed so much.

Supplies
Cardstock - American Crafts
Paper - My Mind's Eye Vintage Charm
Letters - American Crafts
Ink - Docrafts, Ranger
Wood Veneer - Studio Calico

Tools
X-Cut Corner Punch