Happy Monday! Today is a weird Monday. It’s a Federal Day of Mourning which means my husband has the day off, and our local school district has declared it a holiday which means my girls have the day off. But we have classes running at the store so have decided to open as usual. Being the Ex-pat that I am, I plan to get up in the middle of the night to catch Her Majesty’s funeral live … I’ll update you tomorrow on how I did. Best laid plans and all that.
As in all things, life moves on. We grieve our losses and never forget those that have left us, but … well, we can’t stay stuck in that grief and sorrow. So today I share a slice of normal with you all.
September is Back to School time. I am a member of the ScrapHappy Design Team and we are talking about Seasons this month on the blog. Back To School feels like its own season to me so that’s what I shared over there. For that post I showed how I created two different layouts using the same supplies and techniques. One tells the story of Marley’s Back to School experience at the University of Waterloo, the other tells the Back to School/First day of High school experience of all three girls. My youngest Christine just started at the high school so this felt like the right sort of story to tell now.
For Make It Monday, I am sharing one more layout that I made that completes the First Day of School stories (there are still more about Marley’s move in experience that I want to tell but those will have to wait). This layout went through a change after I started taking photos of it for this post. Let’s take a closer look …
This was the layout I created last week during our Drop In night at the store. I put together a kit of supplies from my stash roughly following Shimelle’s September Best of Both World’s kit. I was happy with this layout at the time. It had everything on it that it needed – photos, journaling, a title, some pretty paper and fun embellishments. Job well done, right?
Then I took this photo of it and realized it was off-balance. You see that dark blue strip on the right hand side? That’s the only bit of dark blue on the layout. And it was throwing the whole thing out of balance. So I went back to my kit to see if that blue showed up in any other papers. And it did … but … that paper had lemons on it. Lemons?? What the heck.
Kind of works though doesn’t it? The lesson here is; don’t get too stuck into the whole “lemons are for pages about lemon trees or lemonade” thing, and remember to always balance your colours! I know better. I know that when you add one colour to one part of a design, you need to make sure it shows up elsewhere or it will throw everything off.
Moving on.
This is a fairly typical layout for this time of year – minus the fact that I’m missing a child AND there is no photos of all three of them together (which I was informed we normally take). I guess this is just all part of the process of raising children though. Eventually they leave home and your routines change to reflect that.
Before we all break down sobbing over lost baby years, let’s take a look at the elements of this layout to help you recreate something similar using your own supplies.
Get help with your title by using a journaling card to start you off. I know it doesn’t read particularly well, but I’m going with it anyway. The block that has the ‘Tuesday’ on it is from an older Shimelle collection – Box of Crayons. She did these great 6×8″ journaling pads in her collections, and this one had a sheet with the days of the week on it. All I needed was the bit that said ‘Tuesday’ so that’s what I used.
Have fun with embellishments. Those crayons were on the same sheet as the Tuesday block. I detail cut around the tops and then used half of them here to the left of the photo block, and the other half tucked into the right of the photos. I used several pieces from the Simple Stories Good Stuff collection journaling ephemera pack like this little quote card. Packs like this one are fantastic for adding in little details to your layout. And sometimes it’s the little details that can make all the difference.
Embrace fun elements like puffy stickers of back packs, and notebook edge punches when making layouts about school. Neither girl would be caught dead with a pink back pack anymore, but hey, it’s all fair game on a layout! Sometimes a sheet of stickers will have one or two images on them that you don’t think you’ll ever use. This back pack fell into that category until I opened my mind to look beyond what was reality and embrace a more whimsical approach to embellishing this layout.
And there you have it, three more stories told for my albums. Be sure to check out the ScrapHappy Blog to see the other two layouts and to read all about how they came together … and for whom. I was a Guest Designer recently and it was most exciting!
Thanks for joining me today. If you have been granted a day off work in memory of our dearly departed Queen, then I hope you spend some of it crafting. If so, please share what you’re making in the comments. I’d love to check it out.
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