My Scrap Corner: Hello Scrapbooking, I have missed you!!!

Hello, it has been a while. Can you believe that my last post was back in November 2011. Shameful!! But in my defence, I purposely walk away, not only from the blog but from scrapbooking all together. Packed half of my things in bins (I have way to much and ran out of bins). Now why in the world would I do something so stupid?? Good question! There is a few reason. As you may or may not know. We took over the family farm, and that was the reason I quit selling Close To My Heart and quit the workshop nights I was hosting. It would have been impossible during calving season. And then my husband and I took on some extra course (real estate investing) and I wanted to dedicate myself fully to it.

Well then, why are you back?? Another good question!! Truth is I can't stay away. I knew from the beginning that it would be temporary. I do still have to figure something out for my scrapbooking space. Over the years I have accumulated a lot of tools and material for scrapbooking, and my house is small! Purging has not crossed my mind, I love my stuff too much!

Well so here I am. Itching to scrapbook again!!

Before I packed my scrapbook away. I discovered Shimelle!!! She's is an amazing scrapbooker from the UK. In fact she is a Garden Girl on Two Peas In A Bucket. She's got videos posted on youtube. And I fell in love with her style. She's been my inspiration. And you will find a lot of Shimelle style sneaking into my page. In fact here is one she has helped me create.

I decided that today would be the day I scrapbook again and picked a picture.

It's a picture of Mike (my father in law) and Jake (his dog) on the day he first got him. At first I was thinking of titling my page "We Miss You". Since they have now both passed away. But I decided that I didn't want to scrapbook my grief of having lost them and instead scrapbook their lives. The good memories.

I have started following the Glitter Girl (Shimelle) instructional video on Two Peas. It's great she takes a scrapbook question and answered it in her video while making a layout. I watched one where she covered the art of matching different paper and embellishment. So I decided to give it a try.

I picked the picture, then a picked out paper. Most of those are from a collection from CTMH, which makes matching a little bit like cheating. But I did include a paper from my stash of scraps, it's was called Chalk from My Minds Eye (I think it was a yard sale find). And then I also pulled different stickers, embellishments, patterned stick tape. I didn't end up using everything I pulled out but it was nice having everything at my disposal ready for my layout.

I selected a layout from Page Maps (if you haven't visited this website, I strongly recommend you do www.pagemaps.com) Also there are past videos on Two Peas called Stretch the Sketch that teaches how to take a sketch and to change it for your own layout.

To help the paper work together, I inked the edges in chocolate. Originally I wasn't going to mat the picture and follow the layout more closely. But the colours I had selected where pretty subdued and I wanted to make the orange pop a little more. So I used a orange pattern paper to mat my picture placed pop dots and give it a bit of an angle to make it stand out a little more.