I am very excited to participate in my first Paper Issues challenge, specifically their Sketchy Saturday Sketch 004. This one is all about circles – I love me some circles. Pop over to their blog as well, to see the great sketch inspiration from their design team and the layouts submissions already linked up – they are stellar!

Here is an image of the sketch:

For my take on this sketch, I flipped through pictures from a recent trip my sister Shar and I took to Scotland to hike the lovely 117km Great Glen Way. (Shar is also is a Design Team member here on Scrapstorian; she is the one who loves and rocks at distressing, and does our Sketchtorian creations!) I have a couple of pictures showing how we took over her living room with all of our gear, backpacks, and more the day before and day of our departure. I thought these would look pretty neat in circle format, and yup they do.

Here is my layout based on the sketch:

Supplies: American Crafts Amy Tangerine Plus One Flair; American Crafts Amy Tangerine Plus One Thickers; American Crafts Amy Tangerine Plus One Double-Sided Cardstock; and Tombow Mono Multi Liquid Glue

I was having so much adding circles with all the small scraps and bits I had left from my Amy Tangerine supplies that I didn’t leave myself a place to journal about our packing fun, a place to put our packing list, etc. So instead of adding journaling to an already completed layout (which sometimes looks like very obvious added-on-later-oops) I instead created 6×4 ‘journal cards’ in coordinating paper and design to my layout. I will hole punch these and toss them into the album just ahead of this layout page.

The Scotland album I am working on is using this journal card concept for most of the layouts, giving it a really neat travel album, multi-page size, look and feel. In addition to adding a little something different to an album, these journal cards have the added bonus of taking away some ‘journaling’ pressure. You will not “mess” up a whole layout with a little spelling mistake or illegible writing, just a journal card you can easily and quickly remake if you need to. Although if you are like me, I think that poor grammar and spelling mistakes make my journaling more real, so I don’t redo journaling for these reasons – my family knows I am spelling and grammar challenged. Ha!

Thanks for swinging by our blog.

Please also swing by Paper Issues too, you will be inspired – trust me!