What I love about it!

Alexandra Otte
Alexandra Otte

I joined the ScrapHappy Community after the online ScrapSmarter Experience in August 2020. I so loved this event and was immediately hooked by what Alice told us about the community. Especially the LOAD-Challenges! I love challenges and there you get one every day a month long! You can’t imagine how excited I was before my first LOAD. But most important for me was to find a scrapbooking community to share ideas and  the enthusiasm about the creative process. Especially since I don’t have people to scrap with at home. I love to see what others create, this is so inspiring! 

And right now I’m starting a new journey here at the ScrapHappy blog design team. And again, I’m so excited! I’m really looking forward to work with everybody on the team here!

But who am I?
My name is Alex.  I’m from a rather small town in the middle of Germany where I work as an equine osteopath. So horses are a big part of my life, what you will probably notice from time to time in my layouts. I’ve always loved being creative with colours and mixed media and photography. So I guess my scrapbooking journey started as a child with little gift books for friends and family. Today I do traditional 12×12 paper scrapping as well as digital, sometimes pocket pages. In both worlds I love mixed media style the most!
But see for yourself…

I created this as a featured layout for LOAD October 2021 “The Great Scrapbook Caper”. The story prompt was to tell about a situation that took place over a period of several years, with the chronology of the story in mind. What is better for this prompt than my scrapbook journey? Starting with those little gift books through art journaling, project life and traditional scrapbooking to the inclusion of digital art in 2021. I included the technique prompt – to use the Rule of Three – by choosing three pictures for each part of the journey.

Here is a little peek of how I created that mixed media rainbow background with “reversed stenciling”. To all the native speakers, how is that technique really called? *lol*

Remember that little black and red book from the first step of my scrapbooking journey? When I was 12 I created this as a gift for my mother. I don’t want it to just stand there on the shelf to be never looked at. So I decided to incorporate it into my albums, to make layouts out of the pages that I want to preserve. You see one of those pages here.

This project is very precious to me, for a bunch of reasons. My mother got very sick when I was 14 so this book is part of my last years with her and reminds me of her. And it brings up a lot of childhood memories. Since I’m a keeper I still have my sticker books from that time and I love combining them with my current style and new papers and products. So I love the creative process about these pages. And I realised that some things in my style and what I like about creating were already set that early. I already loved mixed-media, there is a lot of stencilling and collaging in that little book. And with the shown Layout it became obvious that I already had exactly the same favourite colour scheme back then. The Colours of the old pages with the little verses fit perfectly with the colours of my favourite Vicki Boutin-Collection. So this little book in general and the colours of this page in particular were perfect for the story prompt of LOAD May 2023 “Frogs, Pigs and Fuzzy Bears”: Showcase your signature style!

And last but not least a digital layout since I’m doing those a lot lately. Especially when I have a lot of photos (what I usually have *lol*). I hate printing photos so this is a great way for me to deal with that. 😉

The prompt for Day 6 of LOAD May 2024 “Shaken. Not stirred” was to scrap about something left out, maybe something left behind. That was my cue for the pictures of the preparation for the new horse pasture. Friends of mine bought that property and we had to clean up first before sowing grass. Since it was a restaurant terrace before we dug up a lot of funny stuff, like a little treasure hunt. If combined in the right way we kind of found dinosaur bones! A very small dinosaur though… *lol*

The technique prompt was to create a clean and classic style of scrapbook layout. I guess you could say this is a classic pocket page style. But clean… well I really don’t do clean, not my style at all. 😉

Enough of me now. I hope to see you all in our circle community and I’m really looking forward to the new challenges the design team has to offer!

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