Heather's Adventures in Lesotho

My favorite part of Grandma’s 90th birthday party was looking through her scrapbooks. It gave me a new appreciation for what is already my favorite hobby. EVERYONE at the party stopped and looked through the books. It also made me really reflective about the importance of photo & storytelling. Personally I would rather document less but the more important stories than try to document everything. Grandma wasn’t focused on documenting her entire life in pictures & words and yet everyone still got so much out of what she had left.

Supplies: Hung Up Photo Frames No 9, Stamped Blocks No 24, Striping Graphic No 2, Doily Edgers No 1, Sweet Rose Element Pack, Ric Rac Basics No 1, Flossy Stitches White, Corkboard Alpha No 1, Day Out Element Pack by Katie Pertiet; Rise and Shine Kit by One Little Bird Designs; Sunshine & Lollipops Kit by Zoe Pearn; I Heart Stories Brushes & Stamps by Ali Edwards.

One trick I used on this page was blending two background papers to get just the right amount of woodgrain. My original woodgrain paper was too strong so I put a solid piece of dark cream paper behind and then made the woodgrain paper at 50% opacity & it turned out just how I wanted.

I had a few days between my meeting in Arusha, Tanzania and needing to travel to Boston for another work meeting. Instead of flying home to for what would have surely been a couple of crazy days I decided to take a few days and go on safari to Ngorogoro Crater and the Serengeti. I’ve lived in Southern Africa for 7 years now and have been on more game drives than I could possibly count but going on a safari in Tanzania was still on my list of things to do. I went basically in search of cheetah and leopard because they are the two animals I had never seen. On our second morning my guide basically drove from tree to tree in search of leopard and, 3 hours in, we were successful. This meant that I’ve finally seen “The Big 5″ and I figured it deserved a page to commemorate:

Supplies: Holly Two template by Sara Gleason; Naturally Krafty No 12, Bead Scatterings, Little Layette Paper Pack, Powder Mountain Element Pack, Almost There Element Pack, Winter Woods Element Pack, Gator Crossing Element Pack, Wooden Alpha by Katie Pertiet; A to Zoo Kit by Patti Knox; Day Planner Kit by One Little Bird Designs; Stitched by Anna Brown No 1 by Anna Aspnes; This Moment Is Your Life Kit by Jennifer Barrett; CU Shimmerz2 by Flergs.

Thoughts:

1) I’ve had this template in my supplies for ages. I couldn’t stop thinking about getting back to my computer and using it once I had seen and taken pictures of the mama leopard.

2) I could have used pictures all from my Tanzania trip, but instead I had what I thought was an ingenious idea to use old photos to illustrate where I first saw what animals. I think using the old photos really added to the story.

3) The numbers come straight from the template and to spiff them up a bit I used a glimmer style for sparkle. I actually use those glimmer styles quite a bit because they add just the right amount of extra spiffy-ness.

4) I used the papers from the Little Layette Kit by Katie Pertiet that I’ve had for ages. I’m usually luck if I use a kit once, but I can easily say that Little Layette is one of my all-time faves. I use it over and over again.

I have been creating a bunch of layout inspired by the Scrapbook Coach series from Debbie Hodge at Get It Scrapped.com. The class comes with one PDF as a reference with all the slides from the powerpoints in the video and then four video lessons. My process has been to watch the video then pick out some pictures and re-watch the video while I scrap along. What’s great, though, is that the lessons really give you a foundation to start from so you can copy it exactly or you can use it as an inspiration springboard. Here’s the first layout that I did that’s a direct copy (but with different supplies, of course) of one of the lessons in “On a Shelf”:

The “William Kit” by Katie Pertiet was new in my collection at the time and it happened to match the colors in my dress almost perfectly. The instructions were to choose another color that was not in the multi-colored patterned paper as an accent strip. Not only is blue/orange one of my all-time favorite color combos but it also worked perfectly with Lou’s pashmina.

Supplies: William Kit, Powder Mountain Element Pack and Woodside Jangle Element Pack by Katie Pertiet. Sisters Brushes & Stamps by Ali Edwards. This Moment Is Your Life by Kristin Cronin-Barrow. CircleIt! Basics Brushset by Anna Aspnes. Going Places Kit by One Little Bird Designs. Autumnal Spice Paper Pack by Andrea Victoria. Cut.It.Out Clipping Masks by Robyn Meierotto.

Week 3 of the Guided Study Critique Workshop at Get It Scrapped was on Balance. I think this was the easiest assignment to date for me. Here’s what I came up with:

I have gone through many iterations of layouts using this panorama from my trip to Sehlabathebe in February. I wanted to show off the grandeur of the huge photo (It would print at 12×24) but also get detail shots in. It finally worked with this. At first I just had the photo on kraft but eventually decided to add the strips of patterned paper to the bottom to add a little extra detail. But, I didn’t want the papers to take away from the photo. I can’t tell you have many different papers I tried. The beauty of digi. I also found the little “National Park” cut up amongst my supplies and thought it added  a nice little dimension to the title. After I typed up the journaling to balance the block of white from the title I had some extra space so I added the arrow border stamp.

No changes from the live critique session. I was really proud of the layout and think it’s one of my best ever.

Phew! I can’t believe it has been so long since I’ve updated here. Life has been CRAZY. There is a lot to update on – Easter, Grandma’s 90th birthday, road tripping through National Parks, etc. but I came here  to re-start my series from the Guided Study Critique Workshop at Get It Scrapped that picked up again 4 weeks ago. This Thursday is the last session so I have lots to share. It’s been tough staying caught up while traveling. Thank goodness I’m a digi scrapper and can scrapbook on the road!

I haven’t finished the updates to Week 1′s assignment so here’s week 2: Contrast:

These were photos that I literally took the day I submitted this assignment. I was behind on creating because my family and I were taking a road trip down to Arizona via Moab/Arches, Monument Valley and the Grand Canyon and as I uploaded the pictures I couldn’t help but want to use them. I chose contrast in size (large vs small photos) and color (green and red are opposite on the color wheel). Here’s my second attempt:

The two biggest things that came out of the critique were to:

1) change the size of the smaller photos so they were just a bit smaller. This was actually something I thought immediately after I uploaded it. In the before version it was just a little too top heavy.

2) Increase the contrast of the “You are here” element and the arrow. I tried a lot of different colors – the light and dark blue of the tag and green before settling on white for the lettering. Someone suggested the arrow in the wood veneer – same as the little car element – and that worked pretty well.

I finished this just in time for it to be included in my latest order of prints (since I was in the US and had completed 50 layouts since the last time I printed). I have to say that in person it looks pretty amazing.