A Challenge Layout & A Few Awards

Wow! How is it that another week is flying by? Can you believe June is almost over? More than that, can you believe 2009 is half over??? It is so very true...time really does move at a much faster pace the older you get. I feel like I can hardly keep up. No complaints...life is too full of good times and good "stuff" to ever complain. I just want to be sure I'm taking the time to enjoy all the good stuff! KWIM?

In the past few months, I have been wanting to participate in several of the online challenges that you all have suggested. But the time-moving-faster-than-the-speed-of light thing has kept me from making it happen. I decided to find a challenge partner to provide some accountability. I just knew that would do the trick. My new challenge pal is none other than the awesome Kim Strother! This girl is holding my feet to the fire and I LOVE IT! I asked her to participate in the Forward Progress challenge this month and I suggested one other challenge. Thought we might take it easy the first month and only try our hand at two challenges. At the snap of a finger, she had them BOTH done! So I had to get my rear in gear and try to keep up.

This time I got to choose our challenge. Another dear friend, Jocelyn, made her debut this month as a DT member at Butterfly Crafts. I was so excited for her and I had promised to play along in support of her new position on the team. What would be more appropriate than to let that be our first challenge together.

The current challenge is to scrap a childhood fear. I didn't have to think too hard to come up with the subject of my page, but finding a supporting photo would be tough. I didn't have the time to find and then dig through all my childhood photos. So I decided to create my very first photo-less layout.

(As always, you can click on the photos to make them bigger.)



My biggest fear as a child was a fear of strangers. And I took it to an extreme. Anytime I was spoken to by a stranger, I would burst into tears. Even sweet elderly people at church would speak to me and I would begin weeping. Seems very silly now, but I was totally gripped by fear at the thought of having to speak to someone I didn't know. One would think that sounds like severe shyness, but I wasn't really shy. And knowing me now...you all have to be sending up an "Amen Sista'" cause there ain't no way someone as outspoken as I am could have EVER been shy! LOL! Fortunately, I eventually outgrew it.

I thought I would share a little "behind-the-scenes" info about this layout. The inspiration for it came from a shirt I wore to work yesterday. It had embroidered designs along the hem leading me to want to add stitching to my layout. I also wanted to use a color scheme that mimicked the colors in my blouse. Sticking to a textile-theme, I remembered a rediscovered piece of fabric from my scraproom re-do that I thought would be perfect. The salmon colored fabric has a suede type texture. I thought it went well with some papers from a past Studio Calico kit.




I chose to stitch my little birdie in the lower left hand corner and I stitched an arrow design on the right hand side. After adding a little zig-zag design to the corner of fabric, I decided I had accomplished my goal.



One point to note: The green leaf pattern is actually a piece of shelf/contact paper. It has a spongy texture to it and I thought it was way cool...until...I had to stitch through it! That little birdie was a bugger to stitch when I couldn't tell where my pre-punched holes were. LOL! They kept closing up on me!

Now I just have to share Kim's layout with you.



I LOVE the photo and the title she chose. With her journaling, she discusses her family's avoidance of Halloween and how she was frightened as a young girl by someone wearing a mask on Halloween night and how she still fights that fear today. I am touched by the honesty and openness of her words. There are also embossed spiders under the spider web but they aren't really showing in this photo. Kim did a great job of using them to support her Halloween theme.

If anyone wants to play along with this challenge and give Jocelyn a show of support, I believe this one will be up until the first. Then a new challenge will be posted.

Before I go, I want to mention a few awards I received. Jen, Lynette and Shazza passed this lovely award to me.



Thank you girls for the sweet honor of this award. As I've been known to do of late, I want to share it with anyone who leaves a comment today. Post it on your blog and know that you are appreciated beyond words.

That's it for today! I have been battling Blogger through this entire post and quite frankly, I'm worn out! LOL! Off to bed!

Nite-nite!
L.