Full disclosure: I don’t scrapbook throughout the year. This year in particular has been tough. I try to do a little scrappy work whenever I can. In a typical year, that means 3-4 layouts get made in a month, usually over the weekends. This year I’ve been teaching online during a pandemic. The learning curve, student needs, needs of other teachers, and digitizing instruction has just sapped my crafty mojo. My scrapbook room also became my classroom, resulting in spending far too much time in that space.
So how did I post a new layout fairly consistently every 2 weeks? I cheated. I tend to do a lot more scrapbooking in the summer. As a night owl, my creations are often made from 12:00 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. in July. As I finished up a week’s worth of pages, I would write up some posts and schedule them 2 weeks apart. By the end of the summer, I had enough posts written to take me through the spring. I did put together a couple more layouts in October. Then… nothing. Months of nothing.
I have finally dipped my toe back into the scrapbooking pool. I still don’t have the time I would like for creating. In order to get started again, I decided to go super simple on this layout. I let the patterned background paper do most of the work here. It’s light and breezy, adding just the floral details I wanted to accompany the photos. I liked how it includes the colors from the photos in a much more airy way. I decided to tone down the pattern by using forest green and mint green cardstock. Then I included a matching forest green tone on tone paper.
I went with a highly familiar layout format for me. The dreaded landscape and portrait oriented photo go-to. It’s certainly not creative or showy. It just happened to be exactly what I needed in order to get back to my happy place… no pun intended. This format leaves a space for the title up above the landscape photo, and allows for embellishment along a diagonal.
Though I almost always use minimal embellishments, this feels even more sparse than normal. I wanted to use the metallic vines that go across the top and bottom. This layout is about some fantastic topiaries, so I wanted to make sure my embellishments included as much plant life as possible. That led to me finding the title. From that same 1canoe2 collection, I used the cut apart card for journaling, the flower sticker, and the peach foam heart. (Willow is my favorite collection of all time.) Once those were in place, I looked for a few small details. I pulled out some puffy heart stickers, and those lovely peach and mint velum flowers. Could it use a bit more? Yes. Am I going to do more? Nope. If I fuss until I feel like a layout is perfect, it will never be done.
Disney tip: Though I wanted to go to flower and garden, we couldn’t quite make it work with our schedule. Instead, we were at Epcot for the festival of the arts, about a week before flower and garden started. Honestly, this gave a bit of the best of both worlds. We got the full experience of the festival of the arts, and also got a taste of flower and garden. Some of the topiaries and flowers were already in place while we were there. I loved getting to see some of the beauty that would grace Epcot for the next few months. It was a happy little discovery.
Scrappy Escapades 