The naked scrapper

I should've named myself The Naked Scrapper instead. LOL! I think I may have embellishmentophobia. The paper is always my first focus, and then it's photos, title and hopefully some journaling. I rarely have a plan for the embellishments. It's the same for layoouts and PL. They always come last and sometimes I have to force myself to add them, because I know the layout will look naked once photographed. 

I know there are a lot of scrappers that pull together the supplies they intend to use before they start a project. That seems really practical! But can't do that because I rarely have an idea to start with. I bring out a patterned paper and stare at it until something pops into my head. 

Like with this layout about my father. He should've had his 80th birthday on May 6th. The journaling is a list of things I want my children to know about him. 

As I was looking at this black patterned paper it reminded me of an old wallpaper. I also remembered thinking the gold puffy dots looked like tacks. And an idea was born! I printed out some old photos I had scanned into my computer a long time ago. I didn't care that they weren't very sharp. It adds to the vintage feel. 

I "tacked" the photos to the wallpaper and added foam adhesive under a few of the corners. I the printed my journaling on cream cardstock and added my title. It says "About Your Grandfather". I also added some phrase stickers.

And I was happy. I didn't need more. But I knew it would look boring after being photographed.I should add something to the journaling page. I didn't want to. But I tried, I really did. I thought about adding a banner above the title, or maybe a cluster of embellishments. It didn't look good. Then I noticed the foam dots, and thought hey, let's add a full stop after the title. So that's what I managed. A tiny little gold dot to tie the pages together. I had to laugh at myself. 

/Magdalena

PS: For those of you that wonder about the photos it's my father in his 30's top left, and my parent's wedding photo next to that. Bottom left is my father as a baby and my grandmother behind him. Next to them is my father at 3 years old with his cousin Inga.