Scrapping round up

Here's what's been going on in my scrap world lately. (Sorry to my non-scrappy readers!)

I'm once again participating in a couple of contests. So far so good, I have made it through the first 2 rounds in the Scrapbook Survivor contest at The Memory Safe and also through the first round of the Scrap Off at Treasured Times. What I am enjoying about these contests besides producing pages I really love, is that the weekly challenge stretch me and get me thinking outside the box. It would be cool to win, but yesterday I made a really funky page for the contest at Treasured Times and it felt really good!

In other news I have found a new hang-out called Diversity Designs. It's an online community of culturally diverse scrappers and paper crafters. The owners of the site, Rashida and Roselyn aim to promote diversity in scrapping, something that I agree is sorely missing. It's a new site still with not many members, which is great in a way because I feel more at home, and it's easier to get to know the other members.

I have also signed up for two different challenges on The Pub at 2Peas. The first is a Design Challenge hosted by a member who goes by the handle scrapbear2. This awesome lady posts a different well researched topic on design every week, as well as an assignment. So far we have covered Focal Points and Grouping, this week we are doing Rythm and Patterns. Today I finally got one of the books she is using as a reference, the BHG Scrapbooks Etc Design Secrets and I think this will help alot since I can now see the examples referred to in the topic descriptions. I really think that a good grasp of design principles will serve me well.

Secondly I am working on the Layout-a-Day Challenge hosted by Marci Lambert. Basically just a challenge to encourage participants to do one piece of work, be it a layout, card, altered project every day. Since it is one of my goals to create every day, I thought it would be good to be accountable to someone, then maybe I would actually acheive it.

In the last few weeks I have really felt that I am in a good zone with my crafting, things flow much more easily now. I am a lot more comfortable with using colour and mixing patterns, and also more free, I think my style is still basically graphic, but I am definitely seeing some flow now and that feels really good.

Here's a page I did over the weekend just because. I found this photo of me a couple weeks ago and had it in my "must scrap soon" pile. It was originally in colour, but it clashed with the papers, so I converted it to black and white.

I think that since I've done this page and also one at age 37 and another at age 11, I will do a series of pages like this for my Book of Me. I wonder if I can find a photo for every year of my life thus far?