Another LOAD recap and a new direction

Another LOAD has been completed! Again, this one worked out wonderfully for me - very little stress, easy layouts and lots of geat inspiration and comments.

Here are my accomplishments!

28 days

34 pages/ items uploaded

15 digital layouts

3-8.5x11 pages

4 mini album pages

5- 8x8 pages

7-12x12 paper layouts

185 photos scrapped!!!

Since I didn't upload my layouts every day I'll give a brief summary of my top 5 favourites!

#5 I finally got my Israel Top 10 photos layout done - that felt good! It was only a year late but my only regret is not having more space to journal.

#4 I really like how this one turned out of Cierra. I want to do the paper version that is similar to Matt and Marlee's but I'm almost wishing I'd done this version instead - it just suits her (it also received 11 comments!)

#3 I do so few layouts of Drew - so I like this one. He needs more pages - and what can say - all that is on it is true.

#2 I really like how this one turned out. The colours, the simple story, the overall layout.

#1 These photos just speak to me. I love the look on Marlee's face and I'd been wanting to do a layout with these photos ever since they were taken. I'm glad it is finally done.

This was a great LOAD for finishing up a few stories that had been on the back burner. I loved playing around more with the digital layouts - some were so fast yet got the look and story I wanted to tell.

I am really finding that the digital layouts are helping with these stories. I find that I haven't been developing a lot of photos lately - more of them tend to be for Project 365 and I briefly tell the daily journalling. In the past I have developed photos for layouts that I then found to be the wrong size so I have slowed down until I knew what I really wanted. I'm finding digital to be the answer. I can plug them in - adjust the size - add background photos... It's actually encouraging me to do some layouts I probably never would have done. The development at Costco isn't bad either - $2.49 each! Well worth the savings of the aggrivation. Oh don't get me wrong. I can't completely give up paper scrapbooking - I have way too many supplies to do that. Plus there certainly is an allure to that type of crafting.

I have my theme albums I still want to pursue like Halloween, Christmas, year-end month-to-month, birthdays, Christmas cards received, and School of Life. There is also the flexibility that using Drew's laptop is now bringing. I found a 16GB flash drive to store all of the digital supplies on. I hoping this will allow me to do more in front of the tv or away. I recently looked back at the last several years of photos and made a new list of some layouts to make. I'm getting my mojo back! Actually I've already signed up for May's LOAD - and then realized yesterday that we will be in Ottawa for the last few days for Drew's run. I'll be trying to upload from a hotel - hope I can do it!

BTW - check out the picassa album at the side to see other layouts.