Design Your Life

On December 30, after procrastinating for a couple of months, I finally signed up to take an online scrapbooking class, Design Your Life, taught by the incomparable Cathy Zielske through Big Picture Scrapbooking. If you're not familiar with BPS, they offer content-rich online scrapbooking classes taught by some of the best and most well-known names in the business. In the past, they've had classes that lasted for an entire year, while others are brief workshops. DYL is a three-month course, and one of the reasons I finally took the plunge is that by time the twelve weeks are over, it will be the end of March and spring will be just around the corner! I thought some serious scrapbooking and learning might be just the thing to keep the winter doldrums away.

So, we've just finished week one, addressing symmetry, and are now into week two. Cathy said we could post our "homework" assignments online as long as we gave her and the class their due credit. Which is, hopefully, what I'm doing here. The layout above was one of our assignments based on the principles we learned in the first week's lesson, and the layout was created from a sketch provided by Cathy. Can I just say that I LOVE how this layout came out? I tend to be a linear scrapper anyway, so entering Cathy's designing and scrapbooking world doesn't feel all that foreign to me, except maybe that her pages, in addition to being much better designed than mine, are generally pretty sparse in terms of embellishments. But hey, after this class is over, hopefully I'll be designing better pages, too! Anyway, I love all of the blues in this layout and I really love the effect of the enlargement with the smaller photos underneath.

That's my little guy Brian in the layout above, and I didn't want to leave out my teen, so I used pictures of Brandon for another one of our first week's layouts:


Again, this layout was created from a sketch provided to us by Cathy. I made it my own just a little bit by the addition of the heart mini brads and the red line at the bottom. For some reason, those little touches really pull this layout together and make it look finished. I chose that red tab on the left, and then decided another touch of red was exactly what the layout needed.

I did the title on the photo with rub-ons, the old, really great ones from Making Memories that came in those post-bound booklets. Do you remember those? While I bought a lot of them when they were the hot item in the scrapbooking world, in retrospect I should have bought a lot more. Many of my booklets are either almost used up, or have so few vowels left that my options for using them are pretty limited. But seriously, after using many, many other brands of rub-ons over the past few years, I was amazed all over again last night by how superior the Making Memories rub-ons really are. Theirs go on perfectly, practically jumping off the backing onto the surface where you're applying them, yet no one else was ever able to achieve a rub-on alphabet product this good. American Crafts rub-ons (which I used for the "ball" in "Goofball" on the layout at the top) are pretty good, but they tend to break if you move the slightest bit while you're applying them. Yeah, that's why that little green star brad is on the letter "a" -- that's my trick for covering up spots where the AC rub-ons break and can't be patched back together perfectly. So, anyway, after thoroughly enjoying using those Making Memories rub-ons, I checked some online sources to get more, and I ended up ordering a bunch off of eBay! I had to buy lots of the same fonts, but I don't even care. I'm happy to have stocked back up on these superior rub-ons. Now if I could just find a source for those old Making Memories metal ribbon slides, mini-plaques, and snowflakes, I'd be in scrapbooking heaven!