Challenge YOUrself Scrapbook Challenge: Any Holiday Layout

Challenge YOUrself is a scrapbook layout challenge site that requires that you create a scrapbook layout for the monthly challenge and you include a picture that has YOU in it!  We so often take the photos for the special moments, that we often aren’t in any of them!

This month’s Challenge YOUrself theme is to create a holiday layout for any holiday of your choice!

 

I love creating my layouts for this challenge!  It has really helped me fall in love with scrapbooking again.   I can’t believe that it is the 11th challenge for the year.  In the 4 years that March and April lasted, I wasn’t sure November would ever get here! YAY!

I created a Christmas layout with some photos from my 2019 Christmas and some very old Stampin’ Up! Christmas Patterned Paper!

I had a partial package of this paper set and no embellishments that coordinated with it, so I created my own.

I fussy cut the red and green flowers out of one sheet, the trees from another, and I used my 2″ circle punch to cut 3 circles from a totally unrelated piece of red patterned paper.  The nice thing about Stampin’ Up! is that no matter what set of papers you use, you know the colors are the same across the entire range of products.

I also pulled out that Moose stamp from a couple of years ago and punched the moose figures out of sand cardstock.  I added some red enamel dots and some green stars.  I also used my 1/2″ circle punch to punch a few small circles that I’ve tucked around the page.

I’ve been taking some scrapbooking classes just to brush up my skills and find out what is new in the scrapbooking industry.  I am currently working on classes with Shimelle and Victoria Marie.  Shimelle favors the “L” shaped layout with diagonal ephemera clusters.

I’ve never really paid attention to working on the diagonal or using an “L” shaped layout.  (I think I favor the “T”.)

She had excellent design reasons for creating this particular shape, so I wanted to give it a try.

You can see that I have a cluster in the top left, middle and bottom right.  My focal points, which include my titile, journaling, and photo, are all inside the two outer clusters.

My clusters also match fairly closely with the items that I include in each.  Each has a circle, a moose, 3 flowers, enamel dots, a tree and a sentiment strip.

This is the cluster from the bottom right.  I tried to at least lay them out slightly differently in each location.  She really stressed having the same elements in each spot, but in different sizes.  I couldn’t really do different sizes, so I varied the layout.

I think this demonstrates nicely that you don’t need to have a ton of ephemera in your stash.  It’s easy to create your own with things you have in your stash.  Some of the papers in a set are always designed so you can fussy cut the images and used them on your page.  Both Vickin Boutin and Shimelle have talked about this. I’m learning a lot about the collections and design decisions that go into creating a product line and a release.  It’s very interesting!

This is the middle cluster that helps pull your gaze across the page from the left to the right.  You can see that all the same elements are here, but slightly rearranged.

The same is true of the top cluster.  I did include an extra tree and a red ticket that was sitting on my desk.  You can see that I put this at the top of my journaling.

I also used a puffy phrase sticker for my title and put it toward the bottom.  I tried it in the open space to the right of the top cluster, but it felt like it was just floating there.  It felt more anchored to the rest of the layout at the bottom.

I’ve had a lot of fun over the last several weeks creating layouts for daily prompts.  I’m actually looking forward to doing a December Daily and creating a page a day for those challenges.

Tomorrow, I will be spending some time getting all the layouts that I’ve created into albums for my family to browse through the next time we are actually able to get together.  I have not seen my kids since last Christmas!  It’s been even longer since I’ve seen my mother or my sister.  I do talk to my mother on the phone every single day.  It would be nice to hug her, but we wouldn’t have a lot new to talk about!  Just being able to be in the same place for a couple of days would be nice.

Alas, I fear that this holiday season will be a lot different for all of us in our effort to keep our loved ones safe.

If you are feeling lost, alone, or isolated, do start taking some online classes and joining some of the virutal live Facebook and YouTube events that all the crafting companies are doing.  That is helping me cope with this crazy year and the other benefits include learning a ton of new stuff and being an active part of a great crafting community!!!

Thank you so much for stopping by friends!  I hope all is well in your corner of the world!!  Be well!!