Memories and Reflections

I love Kelly Kilmer's blog and have taken several of her online classes - and have loved them all. The latest is Memories and Reflections which is similar to A Life Made by Hand but 'more' - I am already enjoying it. My friend Carol is also a member of this class and emailed today to say she is finding it hard to start! So I thought I would talk about how I go about making a page using one of Kelly's templates. Obviously I can't show the template itself on this blog as this is part of the class but for those who are able to access the group the template can be seen here - bottom row far left. If the link doesn't work it's MARTemp1 bottom row far left.

I spent some time on Saturday evening (while watching 'Con Air' - again!) cutting out images from two sources, a free glossy magazine that I picked up recently advertising events and places in the county of Buckinghamshire and an old National Geographic. I may try and limit myself to just using these as my main images for this journal.

I have a journal already made but have not constructed covers yet - I also decided that I wanted my pages all the same size they are approximately 71/2" x 51/2" - here is my first page

I really liked this sheep and chose her (she looks female to me!) as my main (focal) image. You can see that she is placed centrally and lower down than in the template sketch. This is because - in this case - the picture needed anchoring to the bottom of the page. I then chose an old book page as my largest background piece. The picture made me think of 'counting sheep' to get to sleep and so I used the words (from an advert) as another background piece and then decided on the red check as a third background and a matching journaling label for the fourth. For the last background piece in the bottom right hand corner I used this 3 printed from my PC because by this time the picture was making me think of the nursery rhyme 'Baa baa black sheep'. The 'extra' bit of red check down the left hand side was added to create a 'balanced whole' and was needed because my focal image is placed centrally and not to the left as in the template - it just looked better with it.

Hopefully you can see where my thoughts were leading me when completing this page and the journaling will probably reflect these thoughts - maybe something about my childhood and bedtime nursery rhymes. This type of 'thought process' often just happens when I make these pages even though the decisions to choose particular images aren't conscious ones. Try it and see!