Shimelle Laine recently taught two scrapbooking classes back to back,  The Scrapbook Process and The 20 Project.  I absolutely love Shimelle, and her new classes have me brimming with inspiration and so excited to scrapbook!  I learned a lot of great ideas about album theory while taking these classes, and want to apply some of Shimelle's principles on album continuity and creating an album as a unified, long term project that tells a story.

When beginning to put together my Italy album, I thought that I would want to create each layout using distressed products to go with the 'old world' feel of Italy, and be very careful to not stray from that choice.  But, that ended up being easier said than done.  This album is a challenging one because it has two different types of stories with different feels.  The first are those that feature photos of Italian scenery and buildings when I was sightseeing, which definitely lend themselves to old, antique, and distressed looking papers.  However, the whole reason I was in Italy was to teach English to children at summer camps, and that is the more important story in the end.  The logo of the organization I worked for was based on the pattern and colours of the Union Jack flag, our uniforms were bright red, and our teaching methods were based on enthusiasm, theatre and play.  This contradiction has admittedly given me a little bit of trouble making decisions on maintaining continuity throughout the album over the past while and has caused some frustration.  I decided that it was more important to me to highlight the energy and feel of those days teaching in my product choices, than to scrapbook youthful, playful school pictures with distressed papers just to maintain continuity.  I think that I will start to adapt my album to her "happy medium" philosophy what she uses in her Olympic album, and create pages that still have similarities but with a little more freedom.  I've learned that I can still incorporate some distressed items with some brighter, more clean products, and still make it all work together.

I have to admit, I'm a little bit girly, so this was a challenge for me.  For far too long I have been ignoring tons of awesome items in my stash...things that are bright, punchy, saturated, and primary colours.  I clearly have a comfort zone, and I decided it's time to try something new.  Over my next few projects I want to work on breaking out of my habit of making every page pink, pastel and girly, and try my best to use some new colour schemes and products on my pages.  In the past I have attempted to use bright colours and gotten a little bit too carried away, and not been happy with the end result.  My goal is to find a happy meduim that works for my style.  In this page I am happy that I was able to achieve balance mixing a few brightly coloured pieces with some muted colours and neutrals to tone it down. 
This layout features two pictures from our job orientation week, a part of the trip that was a very fun and crazy, and definitely needed some bright colour choices.  It tells the story of how we went for dinner one day, and, to my surprise, were each given an entire pizza.  The look on my face in the photo tells it all.  I decided to incorporate a colour that I have never dared to use yet on a page: Orange!  I began by using a process video in Shimelle's class The 20 Project: Day 9, as a guideline for my page layout and embellishment.  I pulled out a cute 3x4 journalling card with a speech bubble that I have had in my stash since I first started scrapbooking years ago, and used it as a starting place for my title, journalling, and embellishment.  I mixed together scraps of orangey-red and blue patterned papers to build up background layers.  All of my papers came from two old Recollections paper pads I have in my stash: The Sweetest Thing and Mosaic Memories.  In my embellishment, I focussed on the colours orange and blue with two cameras cut from a camera print paper from the Maggie Holmes Style Board collection, 3 labels cut from a patterend paper from Pink Paislee Memorandum, and Dollar Store brand rhinestone strip stickers.  I managed to bring in some more dark and saturated colour with some royal blue bits and pieces from my stash.  The Bucket List journalling box was originally together on one 3x4 card, and I cut it down to just include a small 2 item list, and the Bucket List sentiment in my layering, which I think is kind of funny.  I also wanted to add in some variety by branching out the colour scheme, and adding in red doilies and a heart die cut from Kaisercraft, and yellow heart stickers from a Jillibean Soup Happy Camper label sticker sheet.  The flat white stickers in the title are from American Crafts Remarks.  I used a tiny scalloped square punch by Recollections for something extra to tuck in among my layers.  Finally I used two roller stamps to add some wording onto the label, a date stamp by Recollections and a phrase stamp by Becky Higgins.

My most helpful tips when creating a colourful page are:

1. Include a variety of colour instead of going overboard with just one or two bold colours
2. Add in plenty of neutral elements in among your colourful pieces to avoid overwhelming your photo

I am so glad that I tried to stretch my colour boundaries, and I surprised myself by creating a page that I love and that really captures the memories of the day.  Thanks for reading! :)