Happy (Inter) National Scrapbooking Day

....one of our favourite days of the year! (especially when combined with Yarn Shop Day, as it is today in the UK...)

If you are looking for somewhere to hang out, may I suggest the We Love GB! (Gossamer Blue Fans) FB page, where there will be a series of challenges with gift certificates for winners and an overall grand prize of a 3 month Gossamer Blue subscription for the person who completes the highest number of challenges. 

While you pull together your photos, and maybe a pair of scissors, I'd like to share what I've been scrapbooking this week. I'm not going to call it a cautionary tale, because it's meant to encourage, but I'm going to warn you that it's not easy viewing. If you are sensitive to scrapbooking-gone-awry, probably you should look away now. No- not quite yet, I'll show you the version I LIKE first:

Now, before that it looked like this:

Not much different? There's one change: the piece of rumpled up green (GB exclusive) paper I took from the side of that photo above and slipped underneath the little orange house, just to hold it down on the page. The ripped and torn paper might be a hint of what actually happened. It wasn't pretty...

On Wednesday afternoon I got stuck into some scrapbooking. My May Gossamer Blue kits arrived and I couldn't wait to get started. So I went in hard and fast and I made this:

It has all the elements I had wanted and planned for on my page: stitching with tiny embellishments added (because I wanted to showcase all the lovely pieces in the kits), a progression in the story, from the shop to home; and colours from the kit which picked up the colours in the photos. I even gutted that border paper so I could flip it over and use the brown dotted reverse side for my title. First page finished! I posted it on IG. And about an hour later I decided that I didn't like it one bit. 

Now, this has never happened to me before. I've had plenty of pages that haven't turned out the way I planned, some I've been able to remake before I've stuck anything down, a few I've added to at a later date, even pages I've simply said "you'll do, you are just for me to look at, and you tell the story, so you'll just have to go in my album the way you are". But I've never had a page I wanted to disown and then rip apart completely. So I thought today of all days would be a good one to own up to it, to say - if you've had fun making it and you love the result? Perfect; if you've had a good time at your desk and you aren't so sure about the end product? No worries, it was a great way to spend an afternoon; and if you want to take it apart, do it. It's paper. We play with it. That's what it's there for.

I played. I took everything apart. I chose a smaller canvas to see if that would help me decide what I really wanted: the smaller you work, the less room there is for extras you don't need. I changed the border paper for one with a higher contrast. I kept the idea of the stitching, but I used it more sparingly. I even took away a photo (just gives me an excuse to make a little entry in my Traveler's Notebook instead). It started to look like this:

And I knew I'd done the right thing. A few extra touches - more black to hold it all down - and I was..

...home. I wanted to make a layout to show off the beautiful things in the May Gossamer Blue scrapbook kit. I hope I got there in the end. And I hope I've inspired you to dig into your supplies today. Happy Scrapbooking Day!