Okay, I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions any more. It was too depressing to constantly fail!
Since 2011 I have chosen One Little Word (check out Ali Edwards site and her class if you are new to this concept) and that has been better for me. Basically, I choose one word that represents what I want to invite into my life that year and when things get a bit tough, I can recall my word and refocus on what’s important. Makes the daily chaos bearable … most of the time! My word for 2011 was RELEASE as I was harbouring a lot of negativity I needed to get rid of. For 2012 I chose FOCUS and it did wonders for my scrapbooking! An unintentional benefit to be sure but I was grateful all the same. It worked so well I chose it for 2013 but less than half way through I had completely lost all focus and floundered for the rest of the year. Lesson there being, no matter how awesome a Word has been for you, chose a new one every year!
This year I have been thinking long and hard and have chosen SIMPLIFY. All that unfocussedness (yes, I am calling that a word!!) has got me down and it is time to regroup, take stock and make some changes! The girls over at SWAT have also been thinking about their Words for 2014 and we have some to share with you. Check out the link to see everyone’s pages. Here is mine.
When I was thinking of this layout in my head I initially wanted it to be white on white but … pink started to speak to me.
I cut down the pink diagonal striped Echo Park paper to 8.5 x 11″ as my OLW album from 2011 is that size (why waste a perfectly good album, right?) and trimmed a piece of heavy white card stock to fit inside. I recently found this heavy weight 8.5 x 11 card stock at Michael’s that is great for card bases and figured it would take the gel medium better than the standard weight stuff.
I used some gel medium and a stencil to get my honeycomb background then splashed some watered down pink sparkly Gelato over top. There was a bit more on the page than I’d planned on so I let it drip to see how it would look. This may not seem like a ‘simplified’ process but for me, it was. I wasn’t trying to match papers to photos or pick lots of little embellishments to help the eye move around the page. I simply put texture and colour on the page in a way that made me happy.
The tiny snippet of patterned paper behind the title was a happy coincidence – found when I was going through my pink papers looking for the border layer. Gotta love accidents like that, right? Not only is it finally making an appearance on a page (can you say horder?!) but it’s a photo of a whole lot of pastels. I really want to explore more mixed media techniques this year so that made me happy!
Okay, now it’s your turn. Create a layout, art journal page, canvas or some other art piece with what YOU want to focus on or invite in 2014 and link it up on the SWAT blog. There is a pretty sweet prize for this one too – a $20 gift certificate to Two Peas in a Bucket!! Right now they have their big Year End Clearance going on and until Sunday they are also offering 25% off practically the entire store!! Click on the image below to browse the deals.
Some of my favourites and/or products that will be going into my cart are:
Fantastic collection for all of my Disneyland photos I still haven’t scrapped!
Great collection for my 3 little girls! Pink, flowers and pastels, what more could a girl ask for?
A made in heaven match to the Penelope collection don’t you think? And I’m a little (okay, a lot) enamel dot obsessed at the moment.
Thanks and have a wonderful weekend. It’s “Taking Down the Christmas Decorations” around here today. What are you up to?
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