A Work in Progress

First and foremost, let me apologize for the photos. I took them late last night and the light was obviously less than perfect. With that being said, on with the show.

I checked out the March/April issue of Creating Keepsakes from my local library. I hate to say it but out of every issue, I usually only find one or two layouts that I end up liking. Most of the others just aren't me. I found My Other Passion on page 81 created by Jen Jockisch and immediately wanted to try it. It's bright, it's colorful and it's about one of my passions as well... books! Jen's layout was done in 12x12 but I decided to do mine in 8.5x11.

It all started with some 1" round punches of various colored cardstock and paper.

Jen's background is solid white and I wanted to incorporate books into mine. I opened Word and using the CK Alis Hand font, I added books I've read until I filled the page. I then printed it out on bright white cardstock.

I know I've read a lot of books but I didn't realize how much once I started listing them. This page is about a quarter of the amount of books I've read. Or ones that I have listed on Goodreads.

Once the cardstock was printed I trimmed about 1/4" off each side and about 1/2" off the top and bottom and I also rounded each corner. I decided to use black textured cardstock as my background and cut that down to 8.5x11. I then glued my text page onto my background.

I played around with the positioning of the circles until they all seemed to fit. I then took a photo so I could remember where each one went once I started gluing them down.

Jen had her circles all down the left hand side. I tried this at first and wasn't pleased with the way it looked. (I'm also using smaller circles than she did.) So in the end I decided on a cluster in the bottom left hand corner. It frees up some more space for me to use.

I'm still waiting on a Cricut. Maybe I'll get one for my birthday next month. The only thing I would really like it for is to do letters. Anyways, since I am Circutless I found some stickers that have been kicking around for a while. The were all different colors so I grabbed my trusty old black Sharpie and went to town. These ended up in the top left hand corner.

And so we have our finished-for-now product. This last photo looks so much better than the others. I took it outside this morning in natural light. I still have to take a photo of some of my books and I'll add some journaling as well.

I'll keep you guys posted.

Happy Hump Day!