I am one of the luckiest girls I know. In fact, whether I like to believe it or not, I can always find some pretty cool things to be grateful for and I am sure you can too. As often as possible, I try to look at my glass as being half full rather than half empty. There are times I need to be reminded of that of course, as we all do. Overall I am a pretty optimistic person.
For example, take this past week. I had what I thought to be one of my most devestating moments. My house flooded only hours before I had to be on a plane headed across the country to teach a bunch of classes to store owners from all across Canada. My washing machine blew a hose and water ran all over my main floor into the basement where unfortunately my scrap space is located. It is now more than one week later and we are still cleaning up the aftermath with the insurance clean up crew.
The worst part of it is that the part of my house that took the greatest hit was my scrap space! The amount of beautiful papers and embellishments that had to be tossed because of the water damage is beyond belief... certainly enough to bring any scrapbooker to tears!!! As horrible as that all sounds, I am so very lucky that few scrapbook pages and projects were damaged. Most of what was ruined was "stuff". Luckily, the things that REALLY matter are okay for the most part. See... my glass IS half full!
With all that going on, I was happy to take a few minutes to myself to unwind and create a page that reminds me of one of the of the better times I have had this year. Using the "Lucky Me" collection in the Abbey Road line seemed to be more than appropriate. The coordinating papers and embellishments provided the perfect combination of colour and design for this layout.
I love the die cut edges on many of the papers and wanted to keep that look, but have the lantern paper as the background. I mounted the lantern paper to the center of the page using pop dots. To keep the fun lantern pattern on the paper, I placed my photos and embellishments where they would not take away from the design. I then layered various die cut chipboard lanterns after inking the edges. Incorporating one of the My Mind's Eye titles made this part of the design process so much easier and it looks GREAT!
I couldn't resist adding one of the gorgeous epoxy brads that match this collection. Simply stunning! Adding journaling to a few of the die cut chipboard pieces allowed me the freedom to just add a few words rather than having to write a lengthy description to fill the space.
So there you have it! Many valuable lessons were learned this week and fortunately I had some lovely My Mind's Eye goodies at my disposal to get me through. It was just the sort of therapy I needed and definitely reminded me how truly blessed I am ... even when some unpleasant things happen.
A quick note: I will be teaching four fabulous classes at a "Weekend to Unwind" coming up November 6-8, 2009 at Sheep River Scrapbook Company in Okotoks, Alberta, Canada. For more information, please visit click here. Registration began Friday, September 11 and spaces will fill fast so if you are in the neighbourhood, I would LOVE to see you there!
Happy Scrapping!
