Welcome to Make It Monday!
Today I am sharing the layouts I completed during last weeks’ Mini-LOAD challenge.
For those not familiar with what a LOAD is, it’s typically a month long challenge where participants are given a prompt every day and expected to create a layout using that prompt. Although, as we know, there are no Scrapbook Police so 100% adherence to the prompts is not required. Just a layout every day uploaded to the group Flickr Gallery. 🙂
This summer Alice (Scraphappy Owner Extraordinaire!) decided to run a mini LOAD. Only one week long. Seven days, seven prompts. That’s doable, right?
Um …. apparently not! For me anyway.
Here are the layouts I managed to create last week.
Day One: Water – Stateroom 7039
Our prompt was to scrapbook something to do with water and since we took a cruise this summer, and I’d started that album recently, I kept going with those photos. My album is going to have 12×12 layouts and 12×12 pocket page layouts. This one will go behind the introductory page that you can see here.
I played around with the placement of my three 4×6 photos. It was tricky to find a way to have two landscape plus one portrait photo! Eventually I cheated a bit and trimmed an inch off each landscape photo and placed them in this block that’s mounted on black card stock. The empty spots were filled in with a journaling card and matching strip of paper. A contrasting strip of patterned paper centred behind the photo block gave me much needed colour and pattern.
The strip of paper below this 4×5 photo fills in a gap as well as providing a nice place for my title to live. I couldn’t fit the ‘7039’ at the end of the title, but placing it underneath allows for the placement of a much needed hit of yellow beside it. The space at the end of ‘stateroom’ was looking a bit bare so I filled it with a row of enamel dots.
I kept the embellishments simple on purpose. Two clusters – centred at top and bottom of the photo grid – were all I needed. It makes the layout feel a bit more formal than perhaps a layout going in a Disney album needs to be, but I’m okay with that. Since the photos are very square and – quite literally – boxed in, it would have been more odd to have looser embellishment clusters.
Day Two: Tastes of Summer – For The Love of Pancakes
The prompt was to scrapbook one of our favourite summer treats. I’ve got quite a few photos of my girls eating ice creams and all sorts of yummy goodies (I even had one published in the Summer edition of Creative Scrapbooker Magazine this year) but as I was looking through some of the photos on my desk, I came across these ones. The Canada Day pancake breakfast is definitely one of our favourite events of the summer! This year the street where this normally happens was all torn up so there was no breakfast – so sad!
Anyway as I was looking for papers to use, specifically something blue, I came across this gorgeous floral from the Hello Again line from Carta Bella. It’s an older paper and one I’ve been hording as ‘something special’. Shimelle had just challenged her The 20 Project students to cut into those ‘special papers’ so … I did. Well, actually, technically I didn’t cut into it. I used the whole thing! Not a very Canada Day-esque colour scheme I’ll grant you, but I love it! Adding giant photo corners from a multicoloured polka dot paper from Shimelle’s Starshine line helps bring the red, blue and pink together beautifully.
This maple leaf embellishment was one I made back in May for a National Scrapbook Day challenge. It’s been sitting on my desk waiting to go onto a layout and this was the perfect layout for it. I love that I gave me space to add a bit of the title (plus I could work the word ‘love’ into the title itself) and it gave me room to journal too.
I complemented those glittery Thickers with some turquoise Stickles, and some droplets of Heidi Swapp’s Color Shine in Turquoise.
Also sitting on my desk and taunting me were scraps of card stock that I’d layered strips of red patterned paper onto. I’d actually die cut large maple leaves out of them as a decoration for my younger two daughter’s bike helmets in June. Every year for Sports Day they get to decorate their bikes or scooters for a Bike Parade that kicks off the day. This year the theme was the Olympics so I’d made Rio 2016 signs and then they stuck maple leaves on their helmets – go Team Canada!
Anyway, the scraps had been sitting on my desk for weeks until I eventually punched a couple hearts and several circles from them. This layout seemed a good place to use the hearts! Because that background paper is so busy I didn’t feel I needed to go crazy on embellishments. That can be hard for me to do sometimes!
Day Three: Relaxing – Game On
I’ve still got plenty of photos to scrapbook from our Epic Road Trip last summer, these two fit the prompt for Day Three. What’s more relaxing than an evening with old friends playing games?
I chose my colour scheme from the photos – warm wood tones, touches of green, orange, and yellow, with a tiny hint of blue. Perhaps not the most ‘summery’ colour scheme ever, but I like it! I loved the message they wrote for us on their chalkboard so I took that as inspiration for my journaling block. I don’t use my white pen very often but I do love how it looks!
Since the photo plus journaling strip goes across the full page, and was feeling very hard and straight, I countered that with a large circle of the yellow chevron which I then cut in half and offset above and below the photos.
There are many ways to create a large circular piece like this. You can use your electronic die cutting machine (mine is buried under papers and enamel dots at the moment so that was out), or you can use pre-made templates that you trace onto your paper (I sold mine ages ago so that was also out), or you can trace a dinner plate (that required a walk to the kitchen … way too hard to do), or you can do what I did. Use a protractor from a 20+ year old geometry set! Yep. Pays to keep all your old school supplies, it really does!
To embellish this layout I looked for stickers with a summery theme, in orange, or with curvy edges. Here I’ve layered two curved edge frames, a couple of sticker strips, and then popped up a sticker with curvy edges. Scattered around are a wooden button sticker, an enamel dot and some yellow ink splatters. Combined they soften the layout just enough, while adding much needed hits of colour.
My journaling spot designed to mimic the photo of the blackboard.
Here you can see how I layered all those frame stickers, word strips, buttons and enamel dots. The orange border sticker was a great find in my stash! It started the whole “let’s add orange” idea.
Day Four: Smells of Summer – The Best Part of Playland
I looked through a ton of photos that I’d already printed in the hoped of finding ones dealing with smells. These ones popped out as fitting that bill. Hot, deep fried, greasy food smells go hand in hand with places like Playland, right?
To keep the feel of this layout as lighthearted as the photos, I used bright colours and layered everything in a casual way. The close up photo of my daughter being goofy needed to stand out so I put it on a mat of green paper. Then dotted that paper into the embellishment clusters to give it more prominence.
Given the fun nature of the photos, I gave myself permission to go nuts in my embellishment clusters. Layers of paper, stickers, die cuts, and wood veneer!
Even the title is fun with this mult-coloured Thickers set from Shimelle’s Starshine collection. And the marque look is also appropriate for the setting.
I honestly didn’t think I’d ever find a place to use that fork and knife sticker! Funny what you find in your stash sometimes!
The top corner of the paper said ‘circus’ on it so I decided to cover that up because it just didn’t fit with my layout. This spot was a good one for another cluster though so no harm done!
Well, there you have it. Only four layouts completed for LOAD this past week but that’s four more stories told so I’m not going to complain. My kids are away this week so while I do have a “honey do” list that’s about a million miles long, I also hope to get into my Scrap Cave a bit more so I can get a few more of those LOAD prompts scrapped.
Have a great week everyone!
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