LOAD 514 Week 2

I often start new projects with a hiss and roar before running out of steam. So far I am still keeping up and enjoying working on the layouts each day. I definitely find weekends much harder when we are all home and frequently out and about. 

Here are the layouts from Week Two.

The prompt for this day was favourite songs and I thought about doing something about songs from my youth but ended up going with one of our favourite songs right now, Pharell's Happy.

The prompt was about school days and although I have used a pair of photos from Miss Four's preschool, the journalling looks at the differences between my kindergarten experience and my daughter's.

 

I am not thrilled by this layout. I love the journalling but the whole layout is not quite right. At least the story is told. The prompt was something to do with telephones. I looked at my phones over the years and had a great shot of Miss Four sitting in the guard house at our apartment answering the phone. I loved this prompt as I would never have thought to scrap about this but the changes in phones during my lifetime have been substantial and it may be of interest in the future.

 

The prompt for today was Puppy Love and as a non dog owner and  someone who didn't really have any pop star crushes I decided to take my cat's name and make her the star. She is a very photogenic Maine Coon and I am glad to have a little more about her added to my albums.

I cannot for the life of me remember the prompt for this layout but I know I went off topic a bit with it. We have been so fortunate to be able to live our dream and spend time living in Singapore with our daughter. We are working towards a new dream for a little later in our life of building a new home in Central Otago. It certainly won't happen in the next five years, but is a medium term goal for us both. 

I am unsure what the theme for today was exactly but I have recorded Miss Four's love of food. She has, until recently, eaten anything. It was nice to show pictures of her enjoying eating and making food and a good reminder to me of how things used to be. I am finding her fussier attitudes to food very trying so I hope things return to normal.

 

The topic for the day was Sick Days and I couldn't find the photo I had in mind for this theme. I did find this one of Miss Four and her father at the park and decided to put a bit of a spin on things. Again, this is not a topic I might otherwise have scrapped about so I am very glad that I have these memories recorded.

We had a lovely weekend. We didn't do anything particularly exciting but had a quiet, relaxed time as a family. I hope you had a great weekend with your friends and family.

 

 

LOAD 514 Week One Layouts (Part 2)

I have to admit I am loving this class. I love getting a new prompt every day and I love the fact that I have completed 15 layouts so far this month.

I have kept these layouts super simple so that I can complete them within an hour. I have absolutely stuck to using photos and supplies that I have in hand. I have found sourcing photos for some of the topics a little tricky but it is quite a good challenge to find a work around on those occasions. The only thing I am kicking myself about is that I have have not made note of the exact topics but most of the layouts are reasonably close this week.

I think the topic for this was board games and as luck would have it I had snapped a picture of Poppy lounging in the middle of one of the games we play most often, Monster Bingo.Poppy loves to be involved when we play games and she is very careful not to knock things over. I was pleased to have a try with the Amy Tangerine letters on this layout.

This layout was based on a Christmas theme. I had these photos taken from a couple of years ago that didn't make it into an album so I am glad I recorded the process of how tree decorating takes place for us. I don't usually play a major role. Miss Four and Tet love decorating it together and my role is to take photos as they do.

I love these photos of Miss Four that were taken when she was about 10 months old. I know I have scrapped some photos from this session before but I just love how her personality is so apparent even then. The theme for today was when you believed your life would begin. I twisted this a little to be when I truly felt like an adult which was with the arrival of Miss Four. I grabbed a random piece of patterned paper from an old kit and added some journalling cards from the most recent Amy Tangerine Project Life mini kit and some random cards from either Studio Calico or Citrus Twist PL kits.

I haven't made a lot of progress with Miss Four's baby album journalling but I am really glad I have finally recorded her early words somewhere other than in her baby book.

I had forgotten so many of her early words. I am so pleased her father wrote everything down!

The seventh topic was the most wonderful time of the year. A lot of people went with seasons, but for us it is always whenever we go on holiday together. We all adore travelling and getting to spend a lot of time together. I am all too aware that in a matter of years Miss Four would rather not spend her free time with us so I am most certainly going to enjoy this while it lasts. All the images in this layout are from Miss Four's first 14 months of life. The top centre photo was our first trip (moving internationally aside) to Indonesia. It was perfect, lots of sun, delicious food and hotel staff who loved our daughter. The bottom right photo was from our post Christmas trip to Phuket. Miss Four loves the beach and she had a wonderful time splashing in the waves, eating sand and her own body weight in pineapple rice. The final image is from our first trip to Japan. This shows my two loves on a ferry in Tokyo Bay. That ergo carrier made trains and sightseeing so much easier.

I am really looking forward to sharing the next seven layouts with you over the next week. I am so excited that I have managed to keep up and that I am finally doing something with my supplies and photos instead of feeling guilty about it.

In between working on these layouts and the normal day to day adventures I have watched the first series of Scandal and a big chunk of series two. I love it! My husband is not that interested so I watch it while he is at work and we are both happy. We have been hooked on The Blacklist and are looking forward to watching the final episode tonight. I love James Spader in this show.

Thanks so much for reading if you have made it to the end. Are there any other shows you could suggest based on the ones mentioned above? I love finding a really good series to watch!

Layout A Day 514 Days 1 and 2

After an unexpectedly long hiatus I am back on board with a major scrappy challenge to get my memory keeping back on track. This month I am taking part in Lain Ehmann's LOAD challenge with my intention being to create 31 layouts over the course of the month.

I am enjoying the challenge so far. I have set myself a couple of rules to keep things manageable. The first is that I am to work from my stash and more specifically some of the bagged Studio Calico kits that are taking up a lot of space in my home. I am also trying to spend no more than an hour on each layout as I have a busy month of visitors and activities planned and do not want to burn out.  

 

There is a theme for this LOAD and it is Past Perfect 2. This means looking at stories from my own past that need telling. If the theme for the day does not fit with photos or ideas that I have then I can broaden and change things to fit. Day one's theme was In The News. Right away I knew we had noted down some headlines and other bits of trivia from the day that Miss 4 was born. I grabbed a couple of old kits and looked for things that worked with the theme and the layout above was the result. I was really pleased to find the news printy style stickers and and patterned papers. I gussied it all up with a cut apart page from Crate Paper and some embellies from Amy Tangerine and Freckled Fawn. The photo is actually when my daughter was about 5 days old but it was the only one I had printed from this age so it will be more than adequate.

The Day 2 theme was If These Walls Could Talk and one of the suggested ideas was our bedroom from childhood. I don't have any photos from my main childhood house but it did trigger a whole lot of memories. I decided to make the layout the colour of my room which was a bright yellow with multiple patterns going on as they did in the 70's. A quick look through my patterned papers and I had more than enough suitable papers and I was away.

I used some more cut apart cards for my journalling which also had a yellow floral which was very similar to the patterned wallpaper in my bedroom. Lain has been really helpful giving ideas such as hitting the internet for stories you don't have pictures for. I would never have told the story of my Basil Brush bench had it not been for this prompt and it was a favourite possession for several years. 

It isn't the loveliest of layouts (and certainly is not quite as square as I would like) but I am thrilled to have recorded a story that would otherwise have been untold.

Here is a little bit of a closer look at the story.

I am counting down to receiving the third prompt later today.

Have any of you taken part in a LOAD challenge before? Did you manage to keep up?

I hope you have a creative weekend and find some time to celebrate National Scrapbooking Day today.