New Layouts

Wow, I am really embarrassed!  I can't believe that it's been so long since I posted last.  We went on vacation the first week in July, then lots of time was taken up with getting my older son ready for his two-week trip to Washington, D.C. and the National Scouting Jamboree, and then....  Well, you know the rest, right?  Life gets in the way sometimes.  But hey, I'm back, and the good news is that I've actually been doing some scrapbooking this summer.  In fact, I went to an all-day crop a couple of weeks ago with a friend, and we both got a ton of pages done and it felt sooooo good to have all of that dedicated time to work on my pages.  Since that crop, I've been trying to keep my mojo going, and I have to say, I've been fairly successful.  So, in the spirit of helping spread the creativity, I thought I'd share a couple of recent pages.

I mentioned that my older son is currently away on a Scouting trip.  He's been gone just over a week and it's amazing how quiet the house is without him around!  Anyway, I created the above layout earlier today, and yeah, I got a little misty-eyed seeing the photo of him in his Scout uniform.  Sometimes it's hard knowing your kids are far away, even when you also know they're having a great time.  Anyway, my motivation for scrapping this particular photo of my son Brandon was the fact that I recently found some awesome Scout-related stickers from K&Co.  I thought I'd seen all of K&Co.'s Scouting goodies, but apparently they have new stuff coming out.  It's hard to tell from the photo, but the stickers are embossed and also feature foil accents.  They are really beautiful and I love that they aren't childish or cutesy, but rather reflect my son's age and the types of activities he participates in with respect to Scouting.

I'm not sure exactly why, but I really like the way this page came out.  Without really meaning to, I used one of Cathy Zielske's design techniques, in that I divided the page in thirds.  My photo and journaling take up the left 2/3 of the page, while the fun stickers are lined up in the final 1/3 of the page.  Notice how I used a strip of cardstock and some rub-on stitches to create a visual dividing line between the areas of the page.  Another thing I like about this page is that I used some really old papers to make it -- and I mean REALLY old.  I'm always surprised what I find when I search through my stash.  More often than not, I find papers that will work great for what I'm doing.

 

This second layout is one I finished during that all-day crop that I mentioned.  I'm including this layout not just because I like it, but because it's an example of a case where I NEVER EVER pictured in my head the layout coming out the way that it did.  I had this great photo of a bird's nest in a tree in early spring, before the tree had even leafed out.  I wasn't sure what I was going to do with the photo, but I suppose I was thinking along the lines of using blues, greens and tans -- you know, earth tones.  Well, at the crop, I pulled out an envelope of goodies that I'd recently won at a crop, and started looking through what I had.  It was a bunch of the newest papers and embellishments from Carolee's Creations.  Very, very cute stuff, but the kind of papers that (for me, anyway) can be kind of hard to use.  But, the robins-egg blue background of the very first paper caught my eye and I decided to use it for my nest photo.  My cache of goodies included some self-adhesive cardstock journaling spots, so I decided to use one of those as well.  Now, I almost NEVER handwrite on my pages, so this was really a step out of the proverbial box for me.  But I liked the idea that the journaling spot picked up the cute flower image, so I used it.  The page felt a little unfinished until I added a few additional coordinating embellishments, but in the end, I was happy with the way the page came together.

What's the moral of the story?  Well, I usually have an image in my head of what a finished layout is going to look like.  It might not be completely focused, but there's almost always an image there.  The layout above taught me that I don't always have to blindly follow that mental image, but instead, if the occasion presents itself, I should be open to trying something new.  After all, you never know exactly how things are going to turn out, and that's part of the fun of scrapbooking, isn't it?