Red Herring

One page or two?  Simple or fussy?  Few pictures or many?  Chronological events or stories about people?  Do you tend to stick with a certain style, or do you adapt your style to fit the project? 

I read a lot of message boards and talk to a lot of scrapbookers about their styles and how they like to work.  I like to think I notice some of the scrapbooking trends and I often try to emulate the styles or learn the techniques that become popular.  But I one thing I notice is that a lot of scrappers get stuck in a rut.  Once a technique or style becomes popular, that’s the only style they will use, and all the other “favorite” styles fall by the wayside.

Not me.  I like to think that I absorb techniques and styles, blending them with my own and adding them to my repertoire like a librarian adds books to her library.  I don’t like to use a technique on my pages too often.  I like my pages to be different.  I change from one page to many, from plain and simple to extremely elaborate.  Likewise, I don’t work on pages in any particular order most of the time because I don’t want the pages to be dated by the current trends or paper styles.  That’s why you’ll often see me using old paper on this blog and shabby chic pages right next to a few that use the color-blocking technique.

Today’s page is my answer to the LOAD 513 Day 6 prompt, “Red Herring”.  If you don’t know what a red herring is, it is a literary device, often used in mystery novels, to introduce a bit of subterfuge, to intentionally mislead, to lead a reader to the wrong conclusion.  I had to think really long and hard about this one, because I’m a pretty open and honest person and I just couldn’t think of any instance where the story might include some kind of red herring.  I actually put off working on my page all day because I couldn’t think of anything. 

While I was procrastinating, I decided to clean up my room a bit and I started doing a bit of planning/packing for a retreat I’ll be going on in a couple of weeks.  I knew I needed to go through my pictures and get a few more printed out.  So while I was sorting through those pictures, I stumbled across the perfect red herring story!

You might note that this is a very simply-styled page.  There’s hardly any embellishments, and the paper is several years old.  I actually bought this paper long before the pictures on this layout were ever taken, but given that my son was well on his way to becoming an Eagle Scout and the fact that my husband is the Scoutmaster of their troop, I figured it was pretty likely I would need this paper some day, so I bought it when I first saw it…just in case.

Could I have used a more modern style on this page?  Sure, but flowers and rhinestones and tons of layered embellishments really didn’t seem to fit, and I was very limited by the paper itself.  Could I have used a more modern paper?  Sure, but I don’t like to waste paper, and honestly, I couldn’t think of a better use for it. If I was ever going to use this paper, now was the time.  So what if my page isn’t the most modern, magazine-worthy masterpiece.  It tells the story, I got to use up some patterned paper that would have otherwise gone to waste, and I managed to stay on prompt for LOAD 513.  And that makes me very happy.