Have you ever participated in a LOAD challenge?
What’s a LOAD challenge, you ask?
It’s a LayOut A Day challenge. Every day for the month of October, I will be sent a story prompt and a technique prompt that I will use to create a scrapbook layout.
The theme of this LOAD challenge is: The Royals
I was a little skeptical about this theme, but it turns out that the prompts help you relate the theme to your actual life.
The story prompt today was how monarchs rule over a realm. We were directed to create a page about the lands we “rule” over. Our home, our town, or our local area would all work for this prompt.
The theme prompt was to include a map, compass, globe, way finder, compass, or geotag on our layout.
I’ve grown to love ephemera. Can you tell?
I have 3 ephemera clumps forming a visual triangle, so I feel like I’m justified to have all this stuff on the page. Plus…every single thing is there for a reason.
I focused on the seagull because it was a recent visitor at our last picnic on September 28. We’ve been taking picnics to different parks and beaches for the last few months to take in the fresh air and the local scenery that we love so much. Seagulls fly over our house whether we are in New York or Florida. We live on islands in both places and we live close enough to the ocean in both places to get a lot of water birds as part of our daily life.
I put both houses above the seagull. My “dominion” is home and my new normal for what my everyday life is like since I retired in December. I still have to remind my husband that we don’t have to go to work anymore, we can go wherever the day takes us! Like on a picnic in the middle of the week with nobody else around. Just the seagulls.
This is real life now. All those years of hard work brought us to this point. The small pieces make the big picture!
I used a 12 x 12″ brown sugar color of card stock for my page base. The I used some 49th and Market Seaside Shipwreck paper for the patterned paper under my photos.
I had some stickers left from the Simple Stores Vintage Coastal album that I made, I had a great set of thickers that had the perfect title for my page, I had some ephemera from 49th and Market that coordinated with my page as well. The sentiment strips are from Tim Holtz and Pink Fresh along with the Simple Stories left overs. The journaling box is from a Tim Holtz collection as well.
Here you can see that I brought in a circle element using a round sticker of a rope that I might find on a dock or pier anywhere I live. I added seashells, a lighthouse, and a salamander because those are things that are always around us.
I chose this title and sentiment strip because it so perfectly fits what I rule over right now in this moment. All the moments of my life before this have created the picture of my life today. Here you can see that the paper has a compass rose and a map in the background.
My top ephemera clump has a doily for a circle element and I thought the color worked really well with the papers. It has a ticket stub and a label with a sentiment that I love. I added some seaweed and an anchor along with a tall ship and shells. Tall Ships that are either restorations or reproductions sail into town throughout the spring, summer, and fall here. This is an actual seaport town so we get some pretty fabulous giant boats sailing in all the time. It’s great! You can take tours on them and we even went to happy hour with the crew of one of them a couple years ago. My kids enjoyed that immensely!
I always love to have an ephemera clump toward the top of the page. I used some great fiber that I got for free from the Sweet Sentiment stamp store for placing an order. I added a ticket that says city bound and out bound. We can actually hear the train coming into town and leaving several times a day at our house. The train whistle and the ferry horn are comforting sounds to hear! There again you can see the seagulls and I tucked in a red hibiscus as a nod to the more tropical feel of Florida.
I added my journaling by creating a pocket on the left side of the page so that I could add a lot of journaling and tell the entire story of this page. This way, I can tuck it in and keep it private and pull it out to read it when I’m browsing the album to remember how I feel today.
I’ll be sharing a lot of scrapbook pages this month along with a few cards! I have the October release from 7 Kids Craft Store to share with you later in the month…it’s a good one, and I have some very cute digital images to share from Kinda Cute by Patricia as well.
So many projects ahead and actual time to do them!!
Thank you for stopping by today my friend! Be well!
