LOAD216 – Days 13 – 19 Roundup

Today is my soon-to-be twelve year old daughter’s birthday party. I am surprisingly relaxed I think! Usually on the night before (when I am writing this) I am in full panic mode. I’m also usually covered in glue as I’m still madly decorating goody bags. But this year my daughter requested that she do everything.

Um … OK! Don’t have to ask me twice!

sniff!

So she made her own invitations on the computer and handed them out. She rummaged through our “party box” looking for decorations. She wrote up a shopping list for food and supplies, figured out which games she wanted to play, and even put together her own goody bags. Who IS this child?! At first she said that twelve year olds were too old for goody bags, but when I killed her idea of having a bowl of loose candy for munching on during the party she acquiesced to small ones full of candy. Funny how that works! A quick trip to the dollar store for clear plastic goody bags, some cute owl stamps and we had a winner! Today my grand contribution to the party was to drive to the store, buy the food, stamp the owls, die cut them out and attached them to die cut tags. She cleaned and decorated and filled said goody bags.

I’m serious! If it weren’t for the raging hormones, I could totally support this whole “becoming a young lady” thing!

So now I am free to write up my LOAD Roundup post for you all. Not familiar with LOAD? It stands for LayOut A Day and the idea is to create a layout every day for the month of February. Our fearless leader Lain sends us a new prompt every day along with some ideas to get the juices flowing and then it’s up to us. You can see last weeks layouts here and the week before that here. Are you ready to see what I created this week?

Day 13 – Roadside Attractions

The prompt was geography so I started with a map print paper and two photos from our family road trip last summer. The map print wasn’t anywhere local (or recognizable for that matter) so I covered most of it up with a pattern paper that reads like a solid and added paint and mist splatters. I’m still using up my Gossamer Blue scraps and that “enjoy the view” card was from a 2013 kit! About time it got onto a layout!

Day 14 – Snack Time

Anyone who knows my husband knows he has a thing for cinnamon buns and donuts so the prompt to scrap food was perfect to tell this story from our road trip. A cinnamon bun from a fantastic bakery in Jasper, washed down with some ice cold water direct from the Athabasca Glacier. What could be better?

I was also playing along with the Sketchy Saturday challenge over at Paper Issues. Click on over to see the sketch I used as my jumping off point.

Day 15 – How We Say Hello Now

The prompt for this day was a colour prompt. The colours of the Australian flag to be exact. I was also inspired by the stars on the flag and knew in my stash was half a sheet of vellum with blue stars on it. While digging that out I found the blue paper with all the speech bubbles on it and suddenly I knew what I was going to scrap about. These photos were taken during a Skype call last summer while my girls were over on Vancouver Island at their grandparents. My middle daughter was goofing around – as usual – and I just had to capture that on film! I’d also been looking for the right layout to use up the last of my Shimelle red, pink and blue camera print paper so this was perfect! I’m not sure if you can tell or not, but up near the top left corner I’ve added some white rub-on stars. I love how they add just a subtle texture. Almost like drips of mist!

Day 16 – Delighted With an Old Favourite

The prompt was about cars and I was looking for a photo of us all in the van during our road trip last summer but apparently I never took one. So, these photos of my younger two playing on a converted fire engine would have to do. I played on this as a child so it was neat to see my girls enjoy it just as much. I was also playing along with Shimelle Lain’s latest challenge which was to combine new supplies with older ones. Since I am ONLY using older supplies right now, I made a special trip to Michael’s to see if I could find something fun to play with. I desperately needed a new blade for my trimmer anyway! Coupons in hand I eventually settled on a package of multi-coloured Thickers. I don’t think I’ve ever left Michael’s having spent so little! Phew!

While I was putting this layout together I wanted to use that ‘Delighted’ card from Shimelle’s True Stories line but then couldn’t figure out my title placement. I went back and forth until I tried layering the letters over the ones on the card. It’s a bit busy but I think you can still read it.

Day 17 – Saying Hello

The prompt was about museums and at the time I couldn’t remember if we’d gone to any museums on our road trip (we had, you’ll see) so I thought about how museums make me feel. For me they are quiet places for refection and looking back. That feeling fit the bill for this photo of my parents head stone. So I told that story instead.

Now, a word about this layout. If you are also doing LOAD and happened to catch this layout in the Flickr gallery, you will see it is quite different. Originally I wrote all my journaling in the lower right corner beneath the photo but I really didn’t like it. I felt it threw off the lightness I was trying to achieve with the rest of the layout. I was inspired by some of Noell Hyman’s white on white layout examples so really wanted to make this layout feel like a deep sigh. A place of peace and calm. The heavy journaling below the photo was ruining that for me. Here’s the original version.

Apart from the poor iPhone photo, I think you will agree that it looks unbalanced. I grabbed another sheet of white card stock, wrote my journaling around the edges, splattered it with the same green mist and then crossed my fingers that the papers would pull up easily. They did! It was unbelievable! All in one go, no rips or tears at all. I added a bit more adhesive though and then simply stuck them down in roughly the same spot. I carefully pulled off the wood veneer pieces and gold enamel dots and re-adhered them to the new layout. I am SO much happier with the re-vamped layout!

Day 18 – Golden BC

As you can see, I found my museum photos! LOL! The prompt was language so these even kind of work for it as part of the museum was an old school. It’s a tenuous relationship perhaps, but I’m milking it for all it’s worth!

Here are close ups of each side of the layout.

I made a mistake in my journaling that I haven’t corrected yet as I’m not sure how to. The reason Golden turned into more than a simple overnight-ing place for us was because my eldest daughter had been studying a book the previous year that was set in Golden. In my journaling I said that the author was from Golden. Oops! If anyone has any brilliant ideas on how to fix this without making a huge mess, please leave me a comment!

Must. Be. Accurate!

Day 19 – Enjoying The Warm Summer Evening

It was another landmarks prompt and as I was looking through all the layouts I’d created over the week I realized that none of them were from my Scraphappy Reunion. I’d set out at the beginning of the month to only scrapbook those photos so it was time to get back on track. I went with these four from downtown Scottsdale. Once I found the Kraft coloured paper with the doily banners on it I knew I had a winner. It’s a super old Studio Calico one. So glad to finally get it out of my stash and onto a layout! The piece de resistance was finding that ‘warm summer evening’ card with the string lights. Talk about perfect for my story! Then I went a bit nuts with the embellishment clusters. I am determined to work through my Gossamer Blue stash and there are so many great sticker sheets and such that there is no point saving. Pile it on now, I say!

Okay, that’s the kind of week I’ve been having. How has your week gone? Did you make anything? Please share a link in the comments below or come over to my Facebook page and share it there. I’d love to see it!

Enjoy your weekend!

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