Welcome to the LOAD blog.
What is Layout a Day (LOAD) Challenge?
LOAD is the Layout A Day challenge. The ScrapHappy family hosts three LOAD challenges each year, in February, May and October, and we do a mini one-week version in August. You can get more details about LOAD on the FAQ’s page here.
LOAD has helped me to scrapbook in a new way.
I always struggled with the journaling part of scrapbooking. I wanted to tell stories on my pages but it was so hard to get past the “You’re so cute!” and “We had fun!” kinds of comments and really dig into thoughtful journaling.
That all changed when I took my first Layout A Day challenge… LOAD.
The goal of LOAD is to scrapbook a layout every day for a month! I honestly didn’t think that was even possible. I’d never scrapbooked every day for a week, never mind a whole month!
I’d been scrapbooking for many years, but my pages felt pretty ‘surface’. I didn’t really dig in and tell meaningful stories. I wanted to create layouts that had more substance but I just didn’t really know how to get there.
Without knowing the magic that was about to change my scrapbooking forever, I signed up for a LOAD challenge.
My first challenge was LOAD213, (with February being the second month of 2013), ScrapHappier!
Every day came with a prompt, designed to bring out a story, or entice you to try a new technique, or use a certain supply. Every day would challenge you a bit.
THE PROMPT:
The very first day asked me to:
Create a layout without words, no title, no journaling, no words. How could you share emotion on your layout without words?
Now, this might sound backwards, how do you learn about journaling without doing journaling?
What it forced me to do is realize that the photo, and my design choices are already telling a story.
I finally realized that my journaling is there to fill in the gaps in the story that the photo and design don’t provide.
THE LAYOUT:
The photo I chose to scrapbook was a photo of my son and his friend flying off of their toboggan over a jump. The photo captures them mid-air, and while you can’t see my son’s face, the expression on his friend’s is awesome!
To capture the excitement I knew I wanted to use a lot of colour. I grabbed a fun template and used my spray inks to create a background.
After seeing the all of the spray on the template I knew I could lay another piece of paper over the template to soak up the extra ink.
This page turned out so well that I decided to use it instead of the piece that I created first. (Happy accidents are the best!)
To capture the feeling of the boys flying off of their toboggan (sled, if you’re from an area where a toboggan is a wool hat, we call that a toque by the way!) I decided to use arrows all over the page.
I felt that making the photo circular allowed it to be the centre of all of the action and it removed the sharp edges. This way the boys are bursting from the centre of the action.
Many of the prompts that came after this encouraged me to tell specific stories from my life. I found that by starting with a story I was able to find photos to embellish the story and I really enjoyed how that new focus allowed me to create pages that had heartfelt meaning.
Alice manages the ScrapHappy membership group, the host of the LOAD challenges. She’s been scrapbooking since 1999 and wants to help scrapbookers tell stories on their layouts. Alice blogs at Scrapbook Wonderland and you can find her on Istagram @aliceboll