The Story of 10 Years

I know the challenge site CSI: Colours, Stories, Inspiration has been around for a long time and I've often checked them out, but until now I haven't played along. This month though I finally found the time since my DT commitments have reduced somewhat and I made a page for Challenge #86.

Here was the inspiration piece. The colours are totally 'me' aren't they? But what I love most is the focus they have on expressing yourself through journaling and they always include prompts for what to write about as part of the criteria. I'm still going through Jill Sprott's online class "Scrapbooking from the Soul" which is also all about concentrating on telling the story so it's all coming together for me right now.

The photo I picked to scrap was one taken on our 10th wedding anniversary while we were out for a romantic dinner. We actually went on a long-weekend away (sans kids!) and it was a really terrific time, although we missed them terribly of course!

Taking my cue from the photo I then chose to journal some of the reasons why I love my husband. One of the criteria for the challenge was to pick a journaling prompt from this list by Ali Edwards (I picked #12). I'll definitely be keeping this for future reference - there's 12 other great prompts on there too!

When I'm faced with a colour challenge I tend to go through piles of my stash and pick out lots of bits and pieces that will coordinate. It often turns out that I throw a whole bunch of them on my page in random arrangement, and most of the time they're older products or things I've often overlooked before. It feels good to use up stash like this! But I had a whole 'eureka' moment when I saw that empty Sassafras alphabet sticker sheet in the right colour and realised I could use it to represent our initials! "M" and "N" all lined up down the bottom of the sheet.... it was perfect!!

And the little pink foam dots? They're the leftover pieces from a sheet of foam Thickers - they're all the extra dots for the top of i's but I'll never use them for that purpose and I've nearly finished the sheet otherwise, so I sprinkled 10 of them across the page to represent our 10 years together.

I'm already looking to the next CSI challenge to try and play along again!