I call this one "The Layout That Got Done Twice."
Okay, so, yes, it's also my Birthday Sushi layout that was up on the Pink Paislee blog on Monday as part of their week long blog exchange with Basically Bare, but it also has the distinction of being one of the few (perhaps the only?) pages that I have completely and totally redone from the beginning. I'll show you the one that didn't make it on the Pink Paislee blog (because I chose not to submit it) in a bit, but first I thought I'd show you the "good" version. :)
I'm not 100% sure what it was about this page that completely threw me the first time around, but I have a strong suspicion that I bowed to a bit of "product pressure." You see, those of us on the Pink Paislee design team who participated in the exchange were sent a fairly generous box of Basically Bare product- several mini albums and many, many packages of their raw chipboard, canvas, and felt embellishments. Even though I was assigned to do only one project with the product and told to just pick and choose whatever I wanted to use, I felt like I needed to put as much stuff as possible onto that one project. If you're familiar with my pages, you know that's totally not me- I love my whitespace!
I'm pretty sure there was also a bit of peer envy involved in this layout disaster, as well. I'm a fairly simple scrapper- not so much artsy or paint-y or ink-y (beyond my beloved mist splatters), but the Pink Paislee design team is filled with girls who are so good at those techniques. They layer. They paint. They spray mist (not just splatter!!). They use pattern anywhere and everywhere, and it works for them!
And then there's me. Simple. Whitespace. Photos. Bits of paper. Punched shapes. Journaling. Stitching. That, in a nutshell, is every layout I ever make. And I like it that way, because my pages suit my personality.
So, what happens when clean, whitespace girl feels she needs to "product it up" and be artsy at the same time? This disaster, my friends, is what happens:
Yeah. No. There was no way I was sending that to Pink Paislee as fulfillment of my assignment. Not in a million years. To me it was too busy, too messy, and everything was crammed together in the middle because I was trying to fit lots of stuff on while still leaving whitespace. Except my whitespace was patterned paper, which wasn't working for me, either (and don't get me wrong, I love that paper!). So I put the page aside (no, I didn't destroy it- it's actually going in my album right along with the other one), took a break, and then came back and worked on rainbow-y goodness with the London Market chipboard buttons instead (you saw that page last week). And then finally I came back and made the page at the top of this post, and I love it!
So, be gone ye dragons of product pressure and peer envy! Next time they rear their ugly heads, I'll just fend them off with neutral cardstock and remember what May Flaum told me in the middle of my creative tantrum- Pink Paislee picked me for my style, not someone else's.
Just keeping it real, guys. :)
Supplies (click on images for product links):