Re-LOAD

Blame it on my addiction…the reason I haven’t posted the rest of my May LOAD images was Great American Scrapbook Convention here in the Dallas area May 31 through June 2.  I found so many great items and bought so much stuff that I don't even know what to do with all of it!  On top of that, I went to the Dallas Crafters Marathon the same weekend, and since then, I’ve been frantically doing everything I can think of to sell four more cabins on our September scrapbooking cruise. I did try to hire an assistant, but since she’s my own daughter and she now has a new boyfriend…well, let’s just say I haven’t seen much of her this month!

Here’s a few more LOAD layouts, and I promise I will post some of my favorite things from GASC in the next day or two!


Day 14: Manic Monday: 3-2-1

This challenge was a little different than any I had done before. Lain limited the products that we could use on our page to three embellishments, two pieces of paper, and one photo. If you’ve ever thumbed through my layout samples, you can see right away that I almost NEVER use just three embellishments, two pieces of paper, or one photo. I’m more likely to have a half dozen things on the page that I call embellishments, three or four pieces of paper, and I once did a page with 21 photos! Luckily, after some digging around, I settled on this graduation photo of my husband. My embellishments were the ready-to-use journaling card (I think it might have been from October Afternoon), a “Graduate” sticker, and the “79” that I cut out with my Cricut. Other than the white “79”, you can see that I only used two pieces of paper – the polka dot background and a maroon piece that I used to mat my photo and also to cover up the parts of the journaling card that didn’t match. I think it’s a very simple but nice page. You can’t see it in the picture, but I went back and used some white Stickles on the “79” just because I like a little bling on my pages.

I ran this card through my printer.  Obviously the green design on it doesn't work, so I covered it up with a strip of paper I sent through my border punch.

Day 15: Conflict

Conflict was a really hard topic for me. I am a firm believer in putting some real life into my scrapbooks, and I definitely have some conflict that should be documented in mine, but I just wasn’t ready to share that with the world. And other than some really serious stuff, I couldn’t think of anything conflicty that was worth scrapbooking…until I thought about my son’s journey to choose the right college. Luckily, I had saved a lot of the recruiting letters and packages that were sent to him starting his junior year of high school and I used those as the basis of this page. It was a lot of fun to just put some things down in random order – it was more like working in my smash book than working on a regular scrapbook page. I think I definitely need to revisit this style in the future! Oh, and for the record…he chose Texas A&M and I’m VERY proud of him! Gig ‘em!

Day 16: Someone else's journaling

I am no stranger to using the words of others in my scrapbooking. I know a lot of people who only journal things from their own perspective, but as a genealogist, there’s a part of me who wants to know the whole story. My son gets really annoyed at me because I’m always asking him questions and debriefing him on his exploits (I have to get my material somewhere!), and I’ve actually trained my husband to journal whenever he’s on a trip with his scouts. It’s worked out very well because I have some great stories in both their scrapbooks that retell adventures they might otherwise have forgotten. The trick is to get the information down quickly, while it’s fresh, even if I don’t have the time to scrapbook the page right away. This particular page is based on a conversation I overheard at Thanksgiving when some older cadets were talking amongst themselves. It’s a great story and it went perfectly with the pictures because by the time I got to debrief him, he’d already forgotten what they were doing in them.

That’s all for this edition. I’ll sort through those GASC pictures and get a slide show posted ASAP!  Oh, and by the way...if you're at all interested in that scrapbooking cruise, I need to sell 4 more cabins in our group and I have some great incentives to make it worth your while!  Send me an email or go to the Crafty Neighbor website if you want the details!