#20 Inspired by turning points

Happy New Year to all! I am so excited to be sharing another year of scrapping with all of you. Lisa kicked us off with a great topic - Turning points. The new year is a great time to reflect about those turning points we have had in our lives.

As Lisa, I came up with a few ideas for this week's prompt. But I settled on highlighting the fact that I love new beginnings. It came to me while sorting memorabilia in preparation for Stacy Julian's Twelve class. The photo reminds me of a more innocent and inexperienced me who was apprehensive about change. That is no longer true about me. I now welcome new beginnings.  I wanted to document that.

This was the resulting layout -

I kept the embellishing simple because my focus was on the story I was telling and the huge picture. I left some white space in the middle to allow the eye to rest, but now I am second guessing my choice and wonder if I should have butted up the photo and journaling. Anyway, it is done and I am happy with it.

Thanks for looking. I truly hope some of your creative resolutions for 2012 include playing along with us. We would love to have you. If you created a layout featuring one of your turning points please remember to add if to our flick'r group under the lable WM#20.

I will be back later with our new challenge.

xo,
Pamage

#20 Inspired by turning points

When I think back on my life I've so many turning points that I could have chosen for this week's challenge layout but in the end my love of BasicGrey won out! I've saved some of the other ideas for a later time although sometimes I'm missing the photos so I need to get a bit more creative with telling my story too. Does anyone else have that problem? Too many ideas? Layouts to make but no photos? Or maybe even, too big a story for the time you have available? I need to come up with a few strategies for these problems. Any ideas welcome ;-)

Anyway, back to BasicGrey. I kept thinking about when I first started scrapbooking and realised that this was a tiny story that hadn't been told. And as it so happens, I still had some of the very first items I ever bought so the two came together quite nicely. What didn't gel so well was the design of the page. But never mind...

I write about the first time I went to a shop selling scrapbook supplies and how I fell in love with it right there and then. I saw and bought my first BasicGrey on that day and the hoarder that I am, I still had a full sheet of tags and a mini-book thing that I decided had to be used today. The mini-book was falling apart (from age!) and so I cut it apart and used it on my layout to house my journalling and also my little accordion book of photos which are hidden underneath featuring the first 4 layouts I ever made and my most recent four. (What a difference!)  I challenged myself to use all the tags and just made a collage at the bottom of the page with lots of loopy twine and popped my title there.

I feel that something is needed directly below the journalling and the top left corner is awfully bare compared to the jumble of the rest of the page - any ideas?

This is definitely not the best layout I've ever made but it includes product that is about to celebrate its 6th anniversary and records a turning point in my crafty endeavours. Job done!

I'm struggling to find my groove this side of New Year and this layout was a bit of an effort to tell you the truth so I'm really looking forward to seeing what Pam has created and to her challenge which should be up here tomorrow.

Lisa
xxx

Challenge #20 week of 2nd January 2012

Happy New Year!

Not the best photo of the almost hour long display of fireworks from the houses around where we live on Saturday evening but you get the idea :-)

It's 2012! I hope that you had a great Christmas, a fun-filled New Year and are now ready for another year of whimsical inspiration.

I don't know about you but I'm dying to get back into more regular creating after the chaos of the last couple of months and am looking forward to continuing with our weekly prompts as starting points to some fun but meaningful layouts.

Challenge #20 comes courtesy of a note I left on our WM discussion board about the Winter Solstice just before Christmas. At the time, I didn't think anything more of it until Pam asked if I was hinting about a future challenge and then I realised that actually, yes I was!

I commented about the Solstice being a turning point in the year for those of us in the higher (or lower) latitudes. So for me in Germany, it's the shortest day in the year and the start of days getting a little longer each day. I don't mind the short days at all - you know how I LOVE weather and nature - but I love the idea of the perpetual rhythm of nature or how a single moment in time can change the way we feel. Those of you who long for the lengthy summer days will appreciate this I think!

So, this week's challenge is turning points which also seems very appropriate for the first week of a new year. Take it broad or narrow, think about key changes in your life, the seasons, getting older, big decisions or even a tiny one. There's many ways to interpret this.

Looking back, I can see that I've created a few pages over the years about milestones in my life such as:

I can't wait to see the turning points you identify to scrap this week.

Don't forget to link up over at our Flickr group (here) using the tag WM#20.

Once again, Happy New Year and all the best to you and your family for 2012.