A Masculine Layout with Feminine Touches? YES!

It's been a beautiful weekend here in the Pacific Northwest. Hot and sunny! I hope you enjoyed yours! My husband and I celebrated 15 years of marriage this week, and he bought me some lovely gifts to be used in my craft room. I cannot wait until my new project case arrives. I'll be able to craft more freely, being able to bring incomplete projects from one room to the next, so that I can finish them while watching TV or when I want to be in the dining room instead of isolated from my family. It's been a wonderful stress reliever, being able to get into doing something creative, while this pandemic rolls on. It's given me stress relief, my own space away when I feel overwhelmed, and just a place to be me, on my own. Once in a while we need that, right?

I know that very soon, I'm going to throw art journaling back into the mix as well, because it gives me a voice. Scrapbooking is wonderful, don't get me wrong! But I find it hard to journal out emotions on pretty pages about events that have nothing to do with how I am feeling in THIS moment. That needs another outlet; enter art journaling. When I did art journaling in the past, it was an act of pure creativity, abandoning perfection and an idea of what the end product should look like. And I could just sit, and add layer after layer, being mindful, and work through emotions in my own head, in my own space. That's how titles for pages would often come out. Something random would pop into my head, and end up on the page. Now that I'm reading about Morning Pages, I realize that I had been doing them in my own way in the past as art journal pages.

Now though, I'm scrapbooking again because I have so many memories to get down on pages. After my mother died almost two and a half years ago, I realized that there were so many of her pictures that I had seen, but I didn't know the story behind them. And there was no journaling. My mother had been a bit of a scrapbooker in her single days but decorated her pages, and not done any storytelling. And I inherited these pages, and that changed how I look at scrapbooking. Originally I had viewed it as another beautiful form of creative expression, art really. Now I see them as so much more. A legacy. Someone will read these once I'm gone. I need to tell the story. So you will definitely see a transformation in my pages in the near future. I will still do artsy pages believe me. I have too many beautiful embellishments to use. 

Which takes me to my latest layout. Here's a masculine layout with feminine touches. Who says that scrapbooking the boys and men in our lives has to be snips and snails and puppy dog tails? It can be an eclectic mix of metals and woods, along side flowers and flourishes. Want to see what I mean? Here's the process video for you. I hope you enjoy it and if you do, please subscribe and share it with friends.

So check in with me next post to see a storytelling page and see if you think I'm on the right track.