After a busy summer with my husband and boys, I’m finally back at my scrap table creating stuff again. I needed the break. It was good to step back and pay attention to my loved ones and make some changes that I’ve needed to make.

Now that the boys are in school again and my littlest has gotten settled into Kindergarten, I’m free to get working again. I’ve decided to look into going back to school for a Fine Arts degree. Not completely sure if I will, but I’m taking a couple of courses to dip my toe in and see how the water feels.

I’m also participating in a Guided Critique workshop at Get It Scrapped. Debbie Hodge is reviewing/teaching design principles and assigning layouts based on those principles. Then we critique the layouts. Here are my first two pages for the workshop:

I’ve made a few changes to this after the critique session, but haven’t taken a new photo yet. I’ve moved the word ‘baby’ closer the the photo, overlapping slightly. I’ve added a journalling date above the photo. And I put a muted banner sticker over the ’1917′ in the top right corner. The red numbers drew more attention than I wanted.

This one I’m happy with as is. If I could move the title slightly, I might, but I’m not losing sleep over it.

For our second week, we learned about size and shape and applied it to our layouts.

This was inspired by Ronda Palazzari’s OLW challenge on her blog. I loved her original OLW challenge blog and am thrilled to see that she’s reviving the challenge on a smaller scale.

Here I’m playing with contrasting photo size. I also was inspired by the current colour combo challenge on the ScrapFit challenge blog. After this morning’s critique session I removed a couple of the chipboard pieces to see the difference.

Wow, what a difference. Lesson learned: when you think you’re done, look for something to remove. Or two.