Finding My Way

I know I have been conspicuously absent from my blog for the last week but I swear, I have a good reason. You see, I won a spot in Karen Grunberg's Finding Your Way class. This 8-week course is a process-based class designed to explore different areas of scrapping in hopes of finding what Karen calls your "authentic self." Anyway, one of the things that Karen encouraged the first week was to embrace LOAD (Layout A Day) for a month. Well, I never in my wildest dreams ever considered doing LOAD. As you read in last week's post, I couldn't even commit to Project 12 so a layout a day for 30 days seemed impossible. However, the more I was reading, the more it made sense. So, I organized my photos, streamlined the way I printed them and started scrapping. And yes, I made 7 layouts in 7 days. I just didn't have the time to take pictures and blog about them before now. So here goes!

First up is a layout I did using a digital collage that I made for free using an online coupon at Walgreen's. The photo is a little dark, but in addition to learning to streamline my scrapping process, I am also trying to embrace imperfection. So here it is:

Journaling reads: Our holiday visit with the Slomovitz's was a little different this year. After enjoying pizza and Christmas cookies at our house, we went to an Islander game and sat in a luxury box!

To create the layout, I first trimmed about a half inch from two sides of the ledger paper and adhered that to a kraft cardstock foundation. Next, I cut squares (or boxes!) from different patterned papers and randomly adhered them inside the grids at the bottom of the ledger paper. The photo collage was printed with a white mat. I added orange and blue mats to replicate the team colors. Since the layout has such a large photo block, I mixed large and small letters for my title and I used a journaling sticker to ground the Tiny Type letters.

At the top of the page, I adhered my ticket stub to some journaling stickers to create a cluster of embellishments. To ground it, I used a thin strip of paper that was punched with the EK Success Postage Stamp punch. And yes, I overcame my fear and pulled out my sewing machine for this one! I duplicated the punched strip and sewing to ground the bottom of the layout and finally added a few threaded buttons for texture and dimension.

So that's it for LOAD Day 2. (LOAD Day 1 was actually my Project 12 layout which I shared last week. ) There will be plenty more layouts to share as I did a layout a day for seven days. I am taking this week off from it since I am preparing for Melissa's birthday. I do, however, plan to start it up again next week!

Supplies:

Cardstock: Bazzill (kraft);

Patterned Paper: My Minds Eye (Lush 2);

Stickers: October Afternoon (various collections); Cosmo Cricket Tiny Type; American Crafts Thickers (Dolce -- Apricot)

Tools: EK Success Edge Punch (Postage Stamp); Janome Sew Mini;

Buttons: Making Memories (Chloe's Closet);

Pen: EK Success Zig (black)