Lessons for next time...

I've been playing around with a few different ideas & styles in my scrapping lately... with mixed results. I'm not 100% happy with them...hopefully i'll learn from my mistakes. It's funny how you can see what's wrong with a layout AFTER when it's TOO LATE and it's all GLUED down. Perhaps i need to start laying out the whole page before sticking ANYthing and before STICKING anything i should really really look to see if i like the overall look of it all.

Lessons from my own Disaster Layouts:

1. Keep it simple, stop adding stuff... It's like that principle about accessories... "before you leave the house, take one item off."
2. Keep the extreme brights to a minimum.... no more than 2 crazy extremely bright colours per layout!
3. Black & White Photo + Black Background = Dodgy Layout :(
4. Learn from previous mistakes... it's like when you're in school and you rub something out with your eraser only to write over it with THE SAME THING YOU JUST RUBBED OUT.
5. Think Before Scrapping: What is the purpose of this page?

Yes, these are all lessons i've learnt in the last week or so. I had originally posted the layouts up but i'm that ashamed of them that they are gone. They seriously look worse than my first layouts when i was starting out (scroll down to see my old layouts).

Okay, i'm going to stop being so hard on myself and share some other recent layouts, ones that i don't think were total disasters!!

"Shabby Chic" Attempt #1 This was my layout for Mandy's Blind Scrap Challenge a week or so ago. Initially i wasn't happy with it, but i grew to really like it. How couldn't i? It's got PINK and it's got SPOTS.

I (L) Cairns....

This is one i actually did a few weeks ago but somehow got lost in the crowd and never got uploaded... I repeated the idea from my t-shirt in the title, used co-ordinating journaling spot & patterened paper (sassafras lass) and kept it pretty simple. I also wrote the names of all (i hope, i did it off the top of my head!) the suburbs of Cairns around the edges. I love journaling in this way, by going around the edges, have done it on a few layouts and i'm always happy with the result.

That's all for now... will have more in a few days as it is.... CYBERCROP WEEKEND over at Scrap Therapy!!