I haven’t been scrapping as much as I’d like this month. Life gets frenetic in our house as fall turns toward winter. First there’s Halloween – a celebration of costumes and imagination which is anticipated for months by the boys. Then we swing right into birthday excitement with first my husband’s then my middle boy’s birthday. And then it’s late November and you can practically taste the Christmas excitement in the air. And through it all is the anticipation of Canadian winter. Snow is coming. And my boys have snowflakes in their hearts and a great sledding hill in their backyard.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that I don’t get a lot of peace in the house at this time of year, and peace is one of my basic requirements for scrapping. What scrapping I did do was to meet a deadline for Debbie Hodge’s Guided Critique Workshop that I was struggling to keep up with. 
Our first topic was white space, or in this case, grey space. Kept it simple, but added the black and white strips to break out of the block a bit and make it a touch more interesting.
Our design topic that week was flow. I used the paper strips above and below the photos to move the eye in a Z shape from the top left of the page to the bottom right. Here’s my revised version replacing the red/teal strips with black/white to tone down the red/green colour combo and the Christmas-y feel that goes with it.
Not sure that did enough. Now I want another layer between the red and the blue/green paper. Maybe I could add a bit of tape. Hmmm … a bit more revising is in order perhaps. Not sure how much I can do with it all stuck down,
Here our topic was alignment. Kept it simple and added the splatters for a bit of background interest.
Our last week, our topic was colour. I LOVE colour, especially subtle colour combinations. But as soon as I tried to scrap using colour intentionally, I struggled and over-thought everything. And I decided that I had to use bright colours, which I don’t tend to use. The result was this:
I like the bright colours, but I kind of lost it with my photo placement. So I tried again and came up with this:
I like the stitched circle in place of the paper one. Still needs a bit of journalling at the bottom, though.
I also made a couple of card for an online crop at The Paper Passion. Felt good to get a creativity fix when I was too distracted by life to start a layout. One for my husband:
and one for my middle boy:
A Little Rough Around the Edges 