LOAD512

Yikes!  I just realized that I haven’t posted an entry to my blog since May 2!  You’ll have to forgive me…okay, you don’t have to forgive me, but I hope you will); we have been really busy here at the Crafty Neighbor studios and the blog has been the last thing on my mind.   It started with our National Scrapbook Day crop party and just snowballed from there.  Right now we are in the middle of planning for a scrapbooking garage sale in July, our Pam’s Pals breast cancer event in August, a scrapbooking cruise in September, and I have been participating in LOAD 512 with Lain Ehman.

If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I did LOAD 212 in February and I actually did post my first entry for LOAD 512 on May 2^nd.  Then I just ran out of time.  So to make it up to you, I’ll post a little more frequently over the next few days and get you caught up on all the juicy LOAD creativity.

As I mentioned on the 2^nd, the theme for May is “Scrapbooking Outside the Box”.  I knew it was going to be a challenge just by the title, and indeed, this go ‘round has been a lot more challenging to me than the one back in February.  In February, I kind of had a groove that helped me get my layouts done a little quicker and without as much fuss.  Since Lain always posts the next day’s prompt around midnight the night before, I was able to see it before I went to bed, and usually I knew right away what the subject of my layout would be.  In the morning I would dig through my paper and supplies and compile everything I needed, and then in the evening I could just whip it out.

Not so, this time around.  The prompts are sometimes so challenging that it takes me all day just to come up with an idea!  Of course, sometimes once the idea hits, everything goes pretty fast, but several of these prompts have left me scratching my head all day long trying to think what might fit the topic.  Some of them took me so long that I barely got them finished by the deadline, and one actually got uploaded one minute late.   Why are these topics so challenging? I’m not sure.  They’re actually great prompts, and I’ve kept them to use again in the future because they can be used in many different ways. 

So without further adieu, here’s a few of my LOAD layouts and the prompts that inspired them!

Day 2:  No Photo

This one wasn’t too hard since I do pages with no photos all the time.  This is probably the fastest page I've ever made!  I suddenly looked up and saw that it was 11:30 (central time) and threw this together.  I was inspired by the flyer I recently found advertising the first cruise I ever went on.  The cruise itself was a turning point in my life.  I'm not thrilled with this page, but I think I could learn to love it.

Day 3:  Holiday Colors on a Non-Holiday page

This one was pretty easy, too.  Since I was already working on pages for my cruise album, I decided to stick with that.  The theme for the album is red, white and blue, so I lifted the colors used for the 4^th of July.  When the page was done, there was an empty spot in the lower right corner.  Christen suggested I cut out circles for bubbles, so I did.

Day 4:  Hearing

The way Lain described this prompt left a lot of leeway for creativity.  Basically, the idea is just to do a layout based on things you hear.  It could be common sounds around the house, music you love, or even about the funny sound you make when you sneeze.  I already had some pictures printed up of my son with his cello when he participated in the UIL Solo and Ensemble competition, so I went with that.

Day 5:  Ebay Inspiration

This was probably one of the craziest prompts I’ve ever seen.  Lain urged us to put our names or nicknames in the search window on eBay and then build a page around something that came up in the results.  We could either use one of the pictures as inspiration for the layout, or we could create a page on one of the objects that came up for sale.  This was another great opportunity to get really creative, so I opted to search  my nickname, “Cindyluhu”.  This turned up “The Grinch” movie, of course, so I had to do a page about how I have always hated my name.  Since I couldn’t find a high-resolution photo of the Grinch and Cindy Lou Hoo, I decided to make a digital layout instead.