There's Hope for Unfinished Layouts - Standing Tall Together

This is the last layout I completed at the Crop Re-tweet. Believe it or not this layout has been sitting in my unfinished pile for well over three years. My best friend sent me these pictures and I just knew that I had to create a layout. So...I turned to my Pagemaps binder found a sketch for a two-page layout and got busy during a crop I attended when I was a CM consultant. From the start, I had trouble pulling it together, and over the years pulled it out over and over again, only to put it back in it's protective envelope. I couldn't figure out why it wasn't coming together, especially since I was starting out with a trusty sketch, which as we know can be turned and tweaked to make it fit your pictures and ideas.

Well while pondering this layout yet again last weekend, my friend and co-cropper said to me, maybe you should try a one-page layout instead, because it seems that you have too much space to make it a two-page layout. Light bulb moment and a big 'ole duhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!! Why didn't I think of that? It's just been in the last couple of years that I've actually done one-page layouts, having always done full albums or at least two-page spreads. So why NOT do a one-page layout instead? Permission was all that was needed for me to move in a different direction, permission that I could have granted to myself had I been thinking outside of the box.

The layout is very simple and in my opinion it doesn't need lots of "stuff" because the pictures tell a story all by themselves. I am so glad that pictures are finally seeing the light of day on scrapbook page. The lesson learned was of course "if at first you don't succeed, try, try again!"

P.S. As I look at this layout onscreen, I am contemplating changing the journaling box from pink to same color used in the photo mat and then matting that with the pink. But...if I don't ever get around to doing it, that's okay too.

Having My Work on Display

I'm so excited! My SDU instructor asked to make a layout to post in JoAnn's to use as advertisement for her class. I thought about making a new layout, but wasn't sure that I would be willing or able to part with a new layout...especially since it takes me so long to make one. So I decided to basically re-do a layout that I had already done for her class.

The problems began when I realized that I didn't have two sheets of the original color I had used as the background. I also didn't have enough paper left used in the first layout to make the water, which by the way wasn't 12 inches wide anyway and necessitated me trimming my background and layering it on another piece of cardstock.

So...off to Michael's I went for more cardstock. Here is the original layout posted several weeks ago and blogged about here:

Here is the new...and [I think] improved layout...

Thanks for looking!

A Sketch Challenge and Scrapping in Four Colors

The following layout came about as a result of a sketch from Everything About Scrapbooking that was actually posted as a challenge last week over at Sistas Scrap Too on the Cricut MB. Here's the sketch:

I decided to also use it as my third assignment for SDU, an assignment we never began in class, but one for which I had already selected paper and photos and so figured, why not kill two birds with one stone? Work smarter, not harder, right? This one was based on a Tetrad color combination, which means using a combination of four colors on the color wheel that are two sets of complements. My colors came from the following families: Blue-Green, Red-Violet, Red-Orange, and Yellow-Green.

One of the things that I love about using sketches is that you can follow them as is, or as your creative juices start to flow, rotate it, flip it, switch elements or whatever your heart desires. They are a great starting point when you're staring at photos and paper and can't quite figure out where to begin. While I didn't follow the sketch exactly, I did try to keep the various elements as close to intact as possible. This time, I managed to remember to do some inking and also experimented with chalking my die-cuts: Here is what I came up with:

 And here is a closer look at the left and right pages:

Thanks so much for looking! Now repeat after me..."sketches are my friend, sketches are my friend!"

Scrapping Using Monochromatic Colors

I don't know if I mentioned it, but I am taking Scrapbook Design and You. I just finished my third class a couple of days ago. One of the reasons I decided to sign up was because I freeze when it comes to choosing colors and tend to use the same ones over and over again. Choosing paper alone can pretty much squash my motivation to create. So, in my never-ending quest to get better at this craft that I love, I signed up for SDU at my local JoAnn's.

Our first assignment was to choose our favorite color. Once we did, our favorite color was given to someone else. I ended up with the red/pink family and I almost NEVER scrap in those colors. We were to choose three hues in that color family and THEN choose our pictures. The instructor also encouraged me to use two different colors for the background pages, something I NEVER do. Both pages always have to be the same. The other thing I learned was a more conscious way to mat my photos...I have never consciously chosen black and/or white to mat, usually choosing to just use one of the colors I am working with...but after this lesson, I see what an impact black and/or white photo mats make. I'm pretty pleased with the way this turned out and had to stop myself from adding too much. I had already spent a lot of time putting Stickles on all of the flowers and leaves. In the process of cutting the layers for all the hibiscus flowers, I gave the "Hide Contour" feature on my Gypsy a good workout. Thanks for looking.