Gotta Love those last minute challenges!

So this has been a week filled with lots of interesting last minute challenges for me. Non-bad but all seeming to reguire late nights and early mornings and last minute Dawn could you please do .......

The latest of which was a call at 7:30pm from a gentleman friend whom I am attending a wedding with today. He says I have had another trucking type issue so I am still in North Dakota and I don't know when I will actually make it back to the city. I think I can be there by noon (note the wedding is at one). Any how seeing as we won't have time for me to shop for a wedding gift........... could you please make up something ?

Now I have had 4 hours of sleep in the last 36, just arrived back in the city 30 minutes previously after traveling to and from the Onion lake Reserve for a work related evernt. This was a cool and fun trip but tiring non the less.

So I smile sweetly and say sure Honey, I will have something ready for the wedding. So I race off to Just Scrap It for these cool boxes of 4 photo albums. I am thinking one nice altered box coming up. Good thing that my scrapping friends could see that I was not functioning on full throttle and with their help materials were picked. Then I went home to create.

So here it is one wedding gift to go! Not To bad for minimal sleep - smile.

Shadow of Me

Shadow of Me is really a photo of my shadow as I stood above the prehistoric pond in Drumheller's Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology. I had spent a couple of hours with a great photographer Melina Perron and she was really patient in teaching me about the depth of field and shutter speed. I was really struggling with these concepts and the effects that they would have on my photos. I took hundreds of photos that day and this being one.

Some times in the course of life you stand back and wonder who or what you are. No matter what your feeling there is always a shadow of yourself waiting to be discovered. I felt this way with scrapping for magazines and clients. I was trying to be what they wanted. So as I started this page I knew I had to cut loose. With simple yet significant things. Such as allowing the adhesive to show through the maya road letters - creating a shadow like effect. With the glimmer misting of Prima flowers (yes you all read it correctly - flowers) to give me the rich warmth and depth I needed to match the paper.The creating of descriptive words with shrink art. The words on the 7 Gypseys tape describing me in the background. and the Flower Soft that I coated the Maya road chipboard with. They aren't hard or difficult things to do but together....they are the shadow of my scrapping style.

Reflecting on Days Gone By

This is just the beginning of a whole lot of scrapping that I am going to be doing over the coming months. I am now at a place in my life where I am truly happy with most of it. Face it I don't think anyone is ever a 100% happy and if they are then they have no dreams or goals to achieve.

I have hundreds and hundreds of photos that I have developed and for various reasons I never scrapped them. I have chosen to spend the next few months scrapping them in the style and methods that appeal to me. I think I lost myself in an effort to scrap in a style that would make publishers happy, and to share with my students. I love to share my passion for scrapping and would and will happily continue to share with those that ask for my help. Only now I am going to follow my heart and scrap with my textures and interactive features. I am ready to deal with photos that had bitter sweet memories, that I longed to scrap so I could remember the good but the more recent negative actions stopped me from enjoying those memories.

The layout above is just such a layout - the photo was one that I had taken of the flowers that were sent to me by a gentleman that treated me like a princess when things were good. The parting of ways was less than kind. Now I am happy and I can truly appreciate the many wonderful things he did and it is time to finish recording the wonderful times we shared. Not to mention the few dozen photos that were printed off to do that - smile.

I love scrapping - it is what keeps me sane in a crazy world. Is it cheaper than a psychiatrist - probably not - grin. However, my family and friends will have a better understanding of who I am, what I felt, and why I did what I did.

So forget what your supposed to scrap, forget what you think you SHOULD scrap, and just scrap from your heart. You will be amazed at how good it feels.