Personal Pages

Sometimes, I make scrapbook pages about my own stuff - things that don't really belong in the Chronological Family Album. I usually put these in an scrapbook I call "ME Album", but the pages are not just about ME. Sometimes, they are about my friends, my mom, my grandparents, my husband, our past, etc.

Today, I am going to show some of the ME pages that I have made recently, specifically those pages from Cathy Zielske's Design Your Life class.

Here goes:

Many online classes start with a pre-assignment that is optional. For the DYL class, this was our pre-assignment. It was pretty free, but the basic idea was to express WHY you love to do scrapbooking.

I used the Windsong kit from Jessica Sprague - another kit that gets pulled from a lot because the colors are so gorgeous. The quote "Creativity is Love moving Forward" is actually from Sheila Asato, owner of the blog Monkeybridge Arts, and was part of her thesis statement for her Masters degree. Absolutely brilliant, I thought, when I first heard that and it now has a place right in my field of vision on my inspiration board which sits just beyond my computer monitor.

In the DYL, one assignment a week focuses on color combinations from the real world. Cathy usually gives us the color combination - sometimes from ads, local restaurant decor, Target pillow cases, whatever. This combination was blue, orange and brown. I can't remember what the source was. Luckily, I had a photo of my mom standing in front of a background using those same colors, and I had been wanting to do a lay out about my mom, so this worked out.

This is a double lay out for Real World Color, using pink and orange. It's a little too loud for my taste, but I do love orange, and I just happened to have photos that sort of went with the color scheme. Oh, this photo from my college days - let me explain here - I came across it one day recently and thought, "This photo needs to be scrapbooked, but where? How?" I got the idea to do a Then and Now theme from the class's gallery as someone else had done the same thing. Perfect for this because these days I feel SO FAR away from that sexy 21 year old girl. And, to give credit to the other two sexy girls in the college photo: Amy O. in the gold velveteen shirt and Shannon in the argyle skirt. Yes, circa 1996, we WERE sexy, girls! 

Don't be jealous, Yusuke, but I have found someone else. What a perfect way to express my most current love. I think this lay out design is supposed to show open white space, so you can see the HUGE margins there cause your eye to focus more on what's really important.

Another scrapbook page about something I love: Decoupage. This lay out design focuses on unity. It's not just the big margins, but also the way the photos sort of flow and show a united front.

Finally, in honor of the Olympics, I made this page just for own pleasure! It is now on my computer desktop. I LOVE LOVE LOVE the color scheme of the Olympics this year. I am dying over the backboards on all the events. I am watching partly so I can see those absolutely gorgeous backboards. If these colors make me so happy, I thought why not make a ME page using them. What better way to utilize this color combo than to make a page about my Authentic Happiness results.

Last fall, I took a test on line for this web site, run by the University of Pennsylvania. Positive Psychology is a huge phenomenon and is basically the study about what makes people happy and how communities thrive. I took the survey for Character Strengths and it showed me my top 5 character strengths. I saved this list and wanted to make a page about it someday, so here it is.

By the way, there are 24 Character Strengths. Go ahead and take the survey to find out yours. You might be surprised at the results!