New layouts and a digi scrapping project

I realised this week that I would have more success capturing my layouts by photographing them, using the camera's manual settings, instead of relying on automatic which I was doing all the time. The pages weren't in focus and the light was always terrible. It pays to learn about the camera because now I know the depth of field was too shallow and the page simply needed to be bluetacked to a wall - outside! So i won't waste any more time with scanning.

This was one of the layouts I completed on my solo retreat, but I wasn't happy with it so I spent some more time on it at home. Which is silly, when you consider these are only mobile phone prints I couldn't bring myself to throw away. Yet I love it.




...and this another one that was sort of fixed. I added the patterned paper in afterwards which made everything the right colour balance, somehow. It's all about the colour, I've decided. Layout design is important but not everything.

I have to admit I haven't scrapbooked for about a week and a half. I've been catching up on my reading (The Happiness Project) which I will write about when I've finished. Really enjoying it too. What I have been doing is thinking about and catching up on my priorities since the end of the year is looming. This week I've been getting up at 5am - which I totally recommend, but get to bed by 10pm - and making double page layouts of each month of 2009. It's really a digi scrapping project, because I'm playing with some cool masks I bought over at Two Little Pixels. I'm using 6x4" sized canvases so it can all be laid down on plain white 12" paper. Each 6x4 will look different - some will be a single image, others will contain several, and some will have journalling. Here are some examples:








I'll post more about this when I've finished a whole page by the end of October. There will be handwritten journalling a title block - the double layouts will all follow a formula.