Sometimes Simple is Superb

It is easy to feel intimidated when looking at another person’s creations.

Some pages are so beautifully layered, I cannot imagine ever doing something so fantastic. When I see something like that, I have to remind myself that is a special page and not all layouts can be like that. Many are designed to inspire or sell products, not necessarily to preserve memories.

Sure, I like to create beautiful art, too, but I have neither the time, nor the funds, to make every page outstanding. I have too many stories to tell and I take too many photos. Besides, simple pages focus on the photos much more than those done in the name of art.

Personally, I would rather see someone adhere their photos to a piece of cardstock and take the time to write the story behind the pictures rather than just frame one photo with tons of embellishments.

So, today I am sharing some of the pages I did last week during my scrapbooking retreat. They are not “artist” pages and wouldn’t be found on display at CHA. But they help me remember those special moments and maybe they will help inspire you to relax and get your memories recorded. (Click on the photos for a larger view).

These are some random pictures of my son while he was in Guam. I used paper, die cuts and a transparency from KaiserCraft. Some of the photos are behind the transparency and some are on top … I love the way they look! The tags talk about how wonderful it is to live in paradise.

These are photos of the chicken tractor my husband designed and built for our chickens. It is designed to be picked up and moved around the yard every week. This way, the chickens always have fresh grass to eat and the yard doesn’t get turned into a sand pit. I was pretty proud of the way he researched and engineered it. It can comfortably accommodate seven chickens. So far, it has worked exactly like he planned!

These are some pictures of my son I “stole” off of Facebook. The quality of the photos isn’t quite what I expect, but they work just fine. This is the first time I have “seen” him working since he joined the Navy, so I was pretty excited to see these pictures. When I went to scrapbook them, I couldn’t find any military paper. I didn’t want to work on plain cardstock, so I used the back of one of the Valentine’s papers from Authentique. I thought it worked perfectly … although it does make me laugh when I flip over the page to lovely pink flowers!

This page commemorates our first time growing vegetables and preserving them for later use. This year, we canned two different kinds of salsa, three different kinds of pickles and two different batches of yellow tomato preserves. I also made sun-dried tomatoes and vegetable broth and froze green peppers, corn, zucchini, yellow squash and eggplant. My mother-in-law also made pickles (her bread-and-butter pickles are so good, I won’t even try to make them), beets and tomatoes. I love looking at all of the food we put up. There is an amazing feeling of pride every time I open that freezer or closet door!Many of the elements on this page are cut from paper, including the tags I journaled on and the jars along the bottom. This is a great way to embellish pages without spending a lot of money … after all, an extra sheet of paper is about $1; embellishments usually run $4 to $5. I used Pop Dots on the jars to make them stand out. This page uses papers from October Afternoon’s Farm Girl line.

So there you have a few simple pages. Hope you can find some inspiration in here, too!