I’m back!
And I’m participating in another LOAD Challenge. Woo hoo! Bring on all the layouts!!
As an added challenge to myself, I’m going to attempt to film my layouts come together each day. BUT … I make no promises and I ask you to hold me to nothing! My life as a mom to 3 teenagers (two of whom are graduating very soon – yikes!), and a small business owner, and an Epicure consultant with a new Season launching in two days (double yikes!), and the primary meal provider, means my average day is a teensy bit hectic. Getting a layout finished and posted to the ScrapHappy gallery every day will be a miracle in and of itself. Filming the process, editing the film, uploading the film, and blogging about it too … that may be too much for my average day. We’ll see.
That being said, I had the day off from the store today so I filmed a process video for you! Yay! Let’s dive in.
If you click on the image above you will be taken to my YouTube channel and the video of this layout coming together.
Our prompt dealt with Big Ben and as I say in the video, it got me thinking about what was happening to Big Ben when we were in London in August of 2017. They were just starting a HUGE restoration project and so on August 21, Big Ben went silent. And stayed that way for almost 5 years! We were in London from August 16th – 20th so we heard the last few days of Big Ben’s chimes. That story definitely needed to be in my album and I’m so glad of this prompt to allow me to tell it this way.
I didn’t have any clock or gear paper close to hand so decided the giant photo of a clock would have to do. I did have some metal arrows that remind me of clock hands so I used them in my embellishments. And I’ve used globes on many of the pages in the Scotland section of this trip, so adding them onto the pages I’ll be making about the England leg is important to me. It helps all the different pages feel connected even if they use vastly different papers and techniques.
A single, large journaling card is great when you have a longer story to tell, and perhaps would have been the safer option for my page today, but this cluster of smaller journaling tags is how I decided to create enough space to tell mine. And I’ll tell you why. I’ve already got a very large photo on the page (i.e. a big giant box), plus a couple large pieces of patterned paper (i.e. more big boxes), and another photo layered on top of the giant one (i.e. yet another box, this time layered on the giant box). If I’d added a journaling card the same size as the photo, it would have become an extremely boxy layout. Not to mention the fact that I would have lost all the space for my title and covered the vast majority of that blown up photo of the clock tower. Kind of defeats the purpose of having a giant photo, don’t you think?
There’s nothing wrong with boxy layouts – grid layouts are some of my favourites! But they can feel quite stiff and formal. And that’s not how I remember this day. It was hectic, and fun, and full of laughter. So I used a collection of smaller boxes, adhered at tiny angles, to break up all those rectangles and create movement, fun, and interest. Using ones in the different colours from the background papers helps tie all the layers together. And forces your eye to move from that globe in the top left, over the photos, to the group of tags where you stop to read the story.
Mission accomplished!
Thank you for watching my process video and reading my blog post. I’d love to know what you think. Leave a comment here or on YouTube with your takeaway from today. And I look forward to creating another layout tomorrow!
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