Are you sick of the layouts yet? lol. I am on a mission to make three this week. Practice makes perfect, right?..

Today I have a layout to share featuring my oldest daughter, Autumn. I actually got a little sad making this one. She’s been living with her dad and step mom since last summer and I sure miss her face around here every day. She is a very dramatic and ’unique’ child who can be more than a handful at times and she may make me wanna jump on the crazy train within an hour of her being here, but it drives me nuts when she’s away! I feel so guilty that she’s always missing so much around here.. I mentioned in a post recently that I postponed our little ‘love party’ for the kids since hubby was sick and she wasn’t here.. well now she won’t be here THIS weekend either and we will have to do it without her. Her dad and step mom are going to visit some family that she doesn’t see too often, so I sucked it up and gave her permission to go along with them. *sigh*. I usually don’t share too much ‘personal’ stuff here.. but this split family stuff is for the birds! Seriously. I TRY not to be selfish when it comes to my feelings, but it hurts to be pushed aside for another weekend so she can do something else… especially when I really wanted her here for our little party. It bums me out to think that I might do a Photo Freedom page or layout about our little party and her cute little face won’t be in the photos. *pouts*

Now I see why they say scrapbooking is an emotional hobby. I eat my emotions.. and I felt like shoving a box of thin mints down my throat. Thankfully, I don’t have any crap food laying around… so I did the next best thing… drank coffee and made a cute little layout.

I used Echo Park Paper ‘For the Record 2′. I used a mix of brads and a little touch of flair. This layout was suppose to have journaling… journaling that was to be printed.. and welp, wouldn’t ya know my wonderful luck.. my printer won’t ‘feed’ the paper in anymore. I JUST bought this printer. This is the same thing that happened to my last printer. Grrr.. so irritating! Guess I will be calling Canon tomorrow. I do like it without journaling though!

I LOVE these photos of my daughter. She still has some baby face chub going on here.. which is now long gone.

THE DESIGN:

I notice I like to be ‘matchy matchy’ as much as possible. If the photos do not match the paper a bit, then I process them to black and white. The FTR2 collection had the PERFECT shades of blue with touches of black to match her dress and denim jacket. I toned down the colors of everything but the clothing to bring in the softer creams and browns in the other papers. She’s very pale so I think this all pulled together nicely. I used several brads, stickers, and chipboard to pull it all together. I created a sense of ‘movement’ with the flowers and doilies going down the right side of the layout. I then balanced that out on the left side of the layout. I added a simple title to the top and that’s it!

So… talk to me, peeps! If you make layouts are you a heavy journaler? I don’t think I could be. For one.. I hate, hate, haaate my writing. I feel the ugly writing would take away from the beauty of the layouts (for me). I wish I had that pretty loopy writing everyone else seems to have! Yes, I am jealous of others handwriting. lol. One of the EP DT members said it adds to the layout to have ‘your’ writing on it. I dunno.. while I agree, I know MY eyes would just go to the 5 year old looking writing. Hmmm. Then with my latest ‘fish face boy’ layout I printed my journaling.. LOVED IT.. buuuuut, I very rarely know what to say. I can’t say “I love you.. you make me smile.. you’re so cute” on every.single.layout. I can easily have things to say if it were a layout about a Disneyland trip or something.. a birthday party, etc. But what about those layouts where you just use the photos because you like them.. Nothing going on, just a cute kid. I know these are for ‘me’ and I can do whatever the heck I want, but I really am curious to what others do and how their mind works when designing.

Alrighty.. I’m off! Thanks for stopping by!