7/4/08

Who's on your mind?

Happy Independence Day !! I hope your day is filled with fun & laughter.


As you go about your day today, Whether you are traveling over the holiday weekend, attending a family get together or just hanging out at home with your family who is on your mind today? I always tend to think about our troops a lot on holidays. It makes me so sad that such young men & women are overseas seeing such horrible things at such a young age. And especially on these fun holidays I feel badly that we are here having fun while they are not able to be here. I especially miss this beautiful young lady today.
























She is not overseas right now.....but she's not near either & we miss her a lot. Below is a favorite layout I created of Amanda & Jake in Chicago after attending her boot camp graduation. This was one of my favorite photos from that trip & I knew I wanted to create a layout with it. This photo is a bit blurry & dark though..the actual layout is a crisp white and the photo is brighter as well. I need to work on finding the best way to get good photos of my layouts (I'm open to your tips if you want to share with me how you photograph your layouts)


I have to admit though that the design for this layout was not my own. While browsing through my Technique Tuesday catalog I saw a layout almost exactly like this one & I knew right away that it would be perfect for this photo. While the majority of my layouts are original designs that I come up with while just playing around with paper arrangement etc. I do get lots of inspiration from fellow scrap artists. On a rare occasion such as this I see a layout that I know will work for me almost exactly as I see it. And that's ok. I think its fine to scraplift a layout here & there if it works for your photo that well.....as long as you don't try to take credit for the design. So thanks Technique Tuesday for this idea !!

Technique Tuesday is one of my favorite lines of stamps on the market today & I have to admit I have a pretty big collection of their stamps. You can view their products here. https://www.techniquetuesday.com/merchant2/merchant.mvc Careful though...it can easily become an addiction.

The one scrap artist that I am most inspired by lately is this woman. http://www.retrospection.typepad.com/ I don't know her personally but have been a fan of her work for quite some time now. A few years ago the Shabby Chic type pages were all the latest rage....it was really frustrating to me because all my magazine subscriptions were full of what to me looked like really messy cluttered pages. My style tends to be more clean & linear so I am really glad to see magazines & idea books getting away from that and showing us more of a variety of layouts to be inspired by. Christine however amazes me....her pages are absolutely gorgeous.....and they have tons of layers & product on them. But she has such a talent that they never look overdone at all. She has been such an inspiration to me to step outside my comfort zone & try new things on my layouts. Thanks Christine !!!
The layout below is an example of me stepping outside of my comfort zone...and I really loved the end result.
I'm off to enjoy my day...hope you all enjoy yours too. And thanks again to all of our military for all you do for us so that we can have the freedom to celebrate the holidays. Be safe !!!






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