'The many beds of Tom'

(Maya Road alphabet,The English paper Company papers, Paper Nation cat decoupage, PSX stickers, Anna Griffin card and frames, Anitas acrylic paint, Glossy Accents, K and Co alphabet stickers and other various items).

This is the second scrapbook page I have made. It's called 'The many beds of Tom' as Tom has these incredible phases on sleeping in a particular place, loyally sleeping there for days, weeks, even months without fail, before suddenly transferring his affection to another place entirely!

The page is designed in a patch work format, as you can imagine, in order to mimick a patchwork quilt on a bed and thus hopefully re-inforce the 'sleeping/bed' theme.

I really enjoyed making this page and has employed 'hidden journalling' as a way of ensuring that the necessary text does not interfere with the 'patchwork' effect which is otherwise consistent in the use of photos, paper and relevent embellishments.

In my short scrapbooking life (all of four pages so far) I have grown very fond of hidden journalling! Partially it's useful in that I ideally want my pages to 'stand alone' to the extent of not needing me to explain what the page is about. In order to successfully achieve that goal, it's seemed necessary to include more text that I can happily/easily place on the layout without the text becoming overly dominant.



Perhaps in time I will gain the confidence and experience necessary in order to 'control' the layout no matter what items I wish to include. My 'more is more' policy no doubt is providing it's own difficulties, though with the next layout I did (one based on Basil cat), I did try to do a 'cleaner' layout and it was by far the hardest page to do, taking ages and involving regular episodes involving putting aside for a few days, calming down and then trying again. I got there in the end and I will post that page next, but it was hard and I certainly wouldn't say I have cracked the issue of 'less is more'..in truth,I'm not sure I really want to; when there are so many nice crafty things in the world and stash to use, why limit myself to using only one to two items a page??! Something for us crafters to ponder!