Aunt Claire

I started this layout about being an aunt in December 2008. This layout went through so many different changes, starting with the colors. I started with more primary colors, but I didn't like how the colors went together. My method right now is to put elements up, and if I'm not completely sure about how it looks, I'll hide it and try something else until I find what looks like I want. Which I guess contributes to how long my process is, and why I think I am perfectionistic about it.

When I first started, I also tried to use a lot of free material that I get from different websites. I tried to recolor a lot of elements so that they would match my pictures. Now, I make a lot of my own paper and create palettes based on my pictures. The website bighugelabs.com has a great color palette generator. That's how I chose which colors to use on this layout, which looked better than the direction I was originally going for. I did create the striped piece in the middle. This was before I realized that since I'm viewing everything at a low percentage on my monitor, I need to consider the size when it's actually printed, not just what I see on the monitor. I don't think I would make those stripes so big anymore. But, I can't change it, because I flattened the image and then saved it, and I don't know if I can work on it as layers again.

I thought of this layout because I had pictures of me holding each of my nephews and niece in the hospital when they were babies, and I liked that as the tie-in. Since I don't have my own children yet, I love taking pictures of them. So my journaling focused on how spending time with them makes me wonder what my future children will be like, but for now I love being known as Aunt Claire. I made their current pictures black and white, then applied a layer mask and erased the background around their faces with a soft paintbrush. I finished the journaling and finalized the layout in February 2009. Of course, since then, I have had another niece, but she was born in Germany, so I was not able to go to the hospital, so there will not be another layout exactly like that one, but that's okay.