Seanna (n. shaw-nuh)

LOAD: May 30th and May 31st (last two!)

Another successful Layout-A-Day month.  I created a layout during each and every day of May.  I am most assuredly not creating layouts today, but I am working on these little mini albums made out of policy envelopes (the open ended long envelopes with the string ties).  That’s different, though.  Anyway, these last two feature more photos of our exchange student from Austria, Cordelia. 

These are more photos from her party from last summer.  I don’t think I took any of them.  I really like the one in the middle.  Just a simple layout of a cutie girl.

For this last one, the prompt was to do a layout about a beginning or an end.  Since I was on a roll with the Cordelia stuff, what could be more perfect than this one?

I absolutely love this one.  I keep walking by it on the top of the stack in here and it is really striking in person.  Looks like a magazine layout or something.  Plus, how can you not love those photos, right? 

So that’s the end of another LOAD.  The next one will be in September.  I’m already signed up.  Right now I am taking a Stacy Julian class, Finding Photo Freedom (I think that’s the name), which is the revamped Library of Memories class.  She very graciously set it up for the alumni of LOM to take for free. Cool!  I actually have not really gotten into it yet, just coming off LOAD and working on these two little mini albums I am committed to finishing by mid-month.  But I will soon, I’m sure.  It’s really good stuff. 

Today is a slow Saturday. I have to put in some overtime this afternoon/early evening, and I am working on my little albums as I mentioned, but other than that, just slow and, I’m assuming, warm outside. I will find out in a little while. I have to go to Hobby Lobby to pick something up for my little project.  I am also planning our Christmas adventure, which will be short and sweet and fairly local, but I’m thinking sort of spectacular since fairly local = Gatlinburg.  What a luxury.  I remember when we lived in Florida and Tennessee was so far away.  Now, it’s not and we need to take more advantage of it than we have lately.  I love Tennessee, always have.  It’s a great place to visit and a great place to live.  We are fortunate to be here. 

Speaking of good fortune, my fabulous husband gave the living room a thorough cleaning yesterday.  Top to bottom, including windows inside and out.  Yay!  It’s all shiny and new again.  So much so that I think it’s time to break out a can of spray paint and hit up the local Goodwill and Habitat for Humanity ReStore in search of some old lamps to transform into new accent lamps for the room.  For less than $20, you can end up with a couple of great pieces that are current, colorful and just right.  And  you can’t beat the price. I am also mulling over the idea of sewing new throw pillows. I am no seamstress but I think I can do that much. We have red and white ones in there now—the white can stay but I think we can retire the red to upstairs and maybe try a new color combo.  I’m thinking teal/aqua with the gray couches.  I dunno.  We’ll see.  Sometimes it’s more fun to think about it, am I right?  More fun—LESS WORK.

Speaking of work, I’m off.  It’s already midafternoon.  How did that happen? 

LOAD: May 27th and 28th AND 29th

HOME STRETCH!  The next post will be the last for this round of Layout-A-Day.  Yay!  Because I’m kinda over it!!  I’ll be ready to go again by September, though.

This one is a three-fer.  I figured I would sneak an extra one in since today’s is done, I really like it, and things may get busy by Tuesday—they usually do.

This one does not look as crooked in real life (and I have trimmed off the extra hang-over on the edge since I took the photo).  I love this photo.  The journaling is about how we will probably always have long driveways from now on because it means we don’t have to worry about being on top of our neighbors that way.  Sad but not really bad—I kind of like them.

This one is about what was in my purse when I cleaned it out.  Actually, it IS what was in my purse when I cleaned it out.  Why do I have a feeling that my great-great-grandchildren will be fascinated with this someday…

This last one is definitely my favorite of the three.  Look at all those great faces and photos (most of which I did not take, by the way)!   I miss that girl…

That photo on the bottom right kills me.  Perfect!  OK I am outta here.  I think there may actually be television I am interested in watching.  Happens once in a while! 

LOAD: May 25th and 26th

This one was supposed to be a quick, 20-minute page because I was having such a busy week and was trying to get to bed earlier than normal since I had to be up early.  Somehow it turned into a two-page layout and it also took 2.5 hours.  Oops.  I really like how it turned out, though.  This is a terrible photo—it’s really much cuter in real life.  I “scraplifted” Nichol Magouirk from Two Peas on this one.  She is so talented.  I always enjoy checking out her stuff.

Now, this one really was only about a 20-30 minute layout.  Yay!  I just had so much fun doing a Christmas page in orange.  I need to fix a mistake on the journaling (I put ‘watch’ instead of ‘watched’) but other than that, it is ready to go in the album.

Today is the 28th, and I have four more days before the challenge is over.  It was another good month—feels good to have more stories told, and I think this time around I did a better job of integrating the layout-a-day into my routine.  Once the challenge is over, I will be getting to work on my photos/memories organization with projects throughout the summer, and then in July I start a new class taught by the same lady who sponsors the Layout-A-Day classes I’ve taken this month and in February.  I won’t be doing a layout a day again until September, though.  Then that will probably be the end of layout-a-day until at least February. 

This will be a quiet Memorial Day weekend for us.  We took two of the above-pictured girls to Knoxville yesterday to drop them off for their summer of classes.  Their lovely grandparents have been gracious enough to allow them to stay at their home.  Yay for lovely grandparents!!  (And thank you so very much to the lovely grandparents, in case they read this!)  As usual, tomorrow is a work day for me and so is Monday, so it’s more or less just a regular “day at the office,” I guess. 

Hope wherever you are, you are having a peaceful or exciting weekend (whichever you were hoping for). 

LOAD: May 23rd & May 24th

The theme for these two days is:  Trips I did not go on.  The one above was a few weeks ago, when Emily and her friend, David, went to Manhattan and saw Wicked.  I  am most impressed that I managed to get 6 photos on this page.

The one below is about the trip to Graceland the girls and my mom took in the summer of 2007.  The journaling is pretty much awesome.  The girls dictated it while I put the page together:

LOAD: May 21st and 22nd

Not my favorite layout but I think it got the most comments yet on my LOAD group.  I used a bowl and an exacto knife to make the circle because my circle cutter didn’t make circles big enough .

I think maybe this one is my favorite so far from this LOAD.  We are down to the home stretch now.  Nine days left!  We’ll see if I can make it.  The inspiration for this one came from a challenge on Two Peas:  Black Plus One.  We were to use black plus one color.  I thought about it all day while I was working and I think that’s why it came together so well, and so fast.  I really had fun with it and I LOVE the littler photos.

LOAD: May 15th through May 20th

Oops!  Guess I got a little behind posting these.  I’ve been faithfully completing a layout every day, though!

I really sorta dug the colors on this one.  I loved the photos but at 4x6 they were not going to be appreciated.  Cutting them down to a uniform size really emphasized them.  This is one of those rare layouts that I didn’t give a title to—although I guess the “Oh happy day” could sorta serve as a title. 

The prompt for this one was about simplicity, I think.  Another one where I loved the photos but some of the water photos were too big at 4x6.  That boat is one of the more picturesque things I’ve photographed in a while, though, yes?  Really cool.  And I ended up getting such a good shot of that lighthouse (not this shot) that I had it blown up to an 8x10 and am going to frame it.  I liked that these were sunset photos without the traditional sunset colors. The journaling is in that little pocket.

Continuing on the small-photo trend—I think this is a recent favorite.  I liked the circle (you’re going to see that again real soon…).  Poor little Paige was so broken that she had to stay in the hospital overnight.  It turned into a party room with pizza and soda and lots of family/friends visiting.  She remembers basically none of it, I believe.  I had to salvage this layout because the kraft paper I used was faded around the edges from being in the sunlight in my old studio, so after I was done and I realized it was more noticeable than I had thought, I made a quick mask of an old piece of cardboard and sprayed the layout with the blue glimmer mist you see on the borders.   I think it turned out pretty cool!

These are older photos, from 2005, and I believe before digital—what a difference.  Much better photos coming out of my camera these days.  Despite that, I love the cake photo even with its too-dark and shadows.  The prompt was again to be very simple with the embellishments, and I think this was pretty basic.  I love the photo of Victor and Beth laughing in the background!

I’m going back to my favorite kraft background, huh?  I see a trend!  Another set of photos that I LOVE.  Those condos on the hill just kill me—so picturesque.  This was before the ski lesson at Sol Vista.  Also, you can see little packages to the right of the layout—I got a “mystery box” in the mail from Sassafras FULL of stuff.  I mean, that thing was packed.  Other than the kraft cardstock, that’s what I used for this layout. I love the alphabets!  You’re going to be seeing more of those…

In fact, here’s more of the alphabets right now!  More old photos—these are from 2002, I think.  Not great, but so so funny.  After I took the photo, I switched out the positions of the big button flower and the one on the top left and I think it looks better.  The children pictured in the photos enjoyed this layout and so did their dad.  The photo on the bottom right where you can see the “Joe” on both of their hats cracks me up.

So there we have it. I have a layout in mind for today, and it’s a putter around the studio day, plus a “put in some overtime” day.  I can live with that!

LOAD: May 13th and 14th

I would say this first one took me about three times longer to do than the second one, for some reason.  Also, I cleaned up my desk, which means we might be saying a temporary farewell to some of the things I’ve been using on the past 5 or 10 layouts.  Or we might not.  When something is working, I tend to stick with it. 

The pile of college stuff in my dining room vs. the pile of college stuff all set up in a freshman dorm.

I’ve shared that photo on my blog before, I think.  Books!  Happy, fun books.  Yay!  P.S. They were all pretty decent except for one, which was basically phoned in and tolerable.  I can’t remember which one for sure, though.  I think Critical Conditions, maybe?  Anyway, who cares?  Books!  Happy!  Fun!!

LOAD May 11th and 12th

TERRIBLE photo.  Layout is much prettier in real life!  Look at that carpet.  Wow, that could make you dizzy after a few drinks.  I keep grabbing cruise photos, seems like.  Mostly that’s just because that’s the storage binder that is closest, but they are also EASY photos to scrapbook.  Great colors, great scenery, what’s not to love, right? The prompt for this day was to do a black & white layout. 

Can you see that I took the photo while the glue on the letters was not quite dry yet?  GO ME!  I love these pocket pages—quick and easy to pull a layout together, and really very practical, too.  I am trying to spread them out amongst the different “eras” of photos.  For this one, I found some of the memorabilia from our cruise, so I tucked it in there, put a random photo of the ship on the front and added a little journaling and some embellishments and called it done.  The memorabilia was one of the daily “capers'” or itineraries of all that was going on on a particular day, and this one was from the last night of our cruise, so they tucked the bill in.  I also threw one of the photos and folders that they go crazy taking and then trying to sell you and a few other little things. 

LOAD: May 9th and 10th

This one was super fast because I woke up and hit the ground running and it was like that all day. I made it during my dinner break at work in like 15 minutes.  I had to do my part-time thing and then hurry and get ready and drive Emily to Chattanooga, where she met her friend David and they went to his house in Atlanta.  Yesterday morning they landed in Manhattan, where I was sort of hoping they saw either the escaped girl peacock from the Bronx Zoo (seems unlikely) or the crazy naked guy in the subway (also seems unlikely because I don’t think David is a subway sort of person, which is unfortunate).  Then I got home from the gorgeous trip to Chattanooga and Paigey was home from school, so that was pretty exciting.  But I had to do some emergency stuff for my part-time thing that I wasn’t expecting and then I had to work. Busy day.  But, I got it done.

Here is yesterday’s, which still makes me laugh. And I know I am not crazy.  That statue DOES look like Chris Rock.

I have yet to do today’s layout, but the prompt is to make a black-and-white page.  Kind of like the cruise one above; I am just ahead of my time, that’s all.  Sometimes I follow the prompts we are given and sometimes I don’t.  Both of the layouts above represent days when I veered off and did my own thing. 

Today is another busy day. Not as busy as Monday, but I have some paperwork to do, my part-time thing and I also have to get my layout done and then put in 9 hours of work later on this evening. I am off to get going on it!

LOAD May 8th: Getting Underway

I sorta used a sketch for this one, but it was mostly about the prompt, which was about color.  I was so happy to get to use that photo of the dumb “ship’s whistle” sign.  I wonder what prompted the need for the sign.  It was right by a ladder-thing.  Maybe the whistle had gone off in the past, startling a drunkard and causing him to tumble down the steps to his doom?  I guess that’s as good a story as any.