learning and moving on....

Over the last six months I have learnt a lot about myself, my style, what I love to use when I sit down to scrapbook and what I love to scrapbook.

I recently opened all my scrapbooks and went though them....and then threw some pages away........I can hear you gasp! lol.....but there was a reason....I have worked on a ton of design teams over the last few years...near on about 5 years I would say.

Over that time I have had assignments, things I have had to do...products to use, journalling prompts that I had to get onto a page.... To get those assignments done I had to be very selective about what photos I used and whether I had the right ones, the right colours the right amounts to fit into a sketch.

This lead me to a lot of pages, that told no story, that had mismatched photos, ones that didn't belong. I used a lot of photos that had no story...nice photos granted but there was no story there. I even found three pages that used the same series of photos...and on each of them there was no journalling on them at all.

And do you know...the pages that I loved the most where the ones before I started applying to design teams...these are the ones with stories on. The pages that had all the photos on from the event and not ones that just look pleasing to the eye.

There were also pages that had products on them that I didn't like ....big embellishments that I had to use, not that I wanted to use them.

A lesson?  yep a big lesson...looking though those albums made me realise where I was going wrong. An example of what I am talking about.....take this page....

yep...this is a recent page....only about a month old..........now I love this page, I love it....several reasons...one because it was the first time that i used chipboard and loved how it looked lol...a silly reason I know but a reason none the less...it had my favourite photos of my gorgeous son on it...it took me a day to complete and I loved all the time I spent on it and enjoyed the process.

BUT........all those photos on this page belong to separate stories...stories that actually I have not yet told....do I regret making this page? nope....but these types of pages now will become less frequent...ones that I will let myself do every now and then. Keep those nice face photos to other things....like a list of what he is into at this moment...or like this page that i made years ago....

 I did this one to document some of his things at the point where he was six....notice most of the photos I used are the same as in the page above!!! sigh........something I need to stop doing...I have thousands of photos on my computer to use.

I am starting to re think...about what i am doing and what i want my scrapbooks to say.


Now this page...this is a new page that I have to show you today...one with some fab photos of my gorgeous nephew on them.

Before I would have just wrote a poem or a quote... or most likely to make sure that the journalling fits in the spot that I had left for it...so I would not have said very much.

on this page I printed out the photos that I wanted to use and then the journalling....all the journalling that I wanted to say.

and then I made my page, around all the important things that should be there.

a new way of thinking? for me...yes but not for others I imagine lol....its a new non design team way of thinking and it has been a long time since I have scrapped that way and will take some time to get used to.

Are you still with me???
 Ready for a GIVEAWAY?????

 okay...I also have realised over the last few months, that I am not an embellishment user...I don't use ribbon...metal embellishments, flowers etc.......they look really pretty, and I am always buying them when I see them, hoping that one day I will use them.

I don't, i like my pages to be flat, i struggle to use anything other than stickers and the occasional brad and button............ I bought lots of Ellie's Studio stuff and my cameo which cuts out all I want........... so what does this mean?

Well it means I have a lot of stuff to give away...and I am going to give it away on here....so I am going to start first with some ribbon...and when I say some ribbon I mean all I have.......I don't use it and it is cluttering up the drawer that could be used for something else....so here it all is.

Interested? well....leave a comment on this post and I will choose a winner....I hate it when people say this is only for certain people, so this is opened up to everyone no matter where you are...there must be some ribbon lovers that read this blog???? I will leave this open till next weekend.

Thanks for letting me drone on today.....I am excited to start on another page. I went boating with my sister and her family today ( I DON'T LIKE BOATS!) and took lots of photos...so I think I will start with them.