This is Me, continued

I finally had some time to start working on the content for my This is Me album.  I spent a good week making lists and looking through some old photos to jog my memory of things I might want to include.  I finally came up with a pretty good list and just picked something and started.  Starting is always the hardest, the fear of the blank page at its finest.

Here is the first page I made, about the family car.

I didn't have any really great old personal photos of the car, just lots of memories and oddly the car keys.  Not sure how I ended up with them but I was happy to have them to include.  I found the sales add online and the postcard at the bottom flips up.  The postcard came from an exhibit at the SF MOMA and I'll never forget seeing that painting for the first time.  It's almost identical to our car, just a different model but the same overall and the car is parked in front of a house in the town I grew up in.  The artist is Robert Bechtle and his work is truly amazing.  The detail of this piece is phenomenal, the painted reflection of the windshield onto the garage door, it's beyond realistic.  I wish I owned this painting.

The second spread that I made has been in the works in my mind for years now.  I always thought it would be cool to do a scrapbook layout of all the houses I've ever lived in.  I had made a list a few years ago and that was where I started.  I had a few of the shots, three actually.  The others I did not and since driving down to southern California to snap a few photos wasn't really an option I went to plan B.  I went online and typed in the address and went from there.  It's funny to see the places now with trees grown and covering up a few of the houses, some still look the same though.  The vellum tabs below each photo lists the address, (which I've covered for some security) and the approximate dates I lived in each place.  That's where things got really tricky.  Remembering that stuff was tough but I used a few dated photos and my resume of all things to help map it all out.  I think for the most part I got it pretty close.

The top right became a pocket for my journaling and pulls out with a little tab.

The class came with a little supply kit and one of the pieces in it was the wood veneer 'random facts' piece.  It was fun coming up with a list of random things about myself.  I knew I also wanted to talk a bit about my personality and these two topics seemed to work well together.  I was making a list of things to talk about and it started looking like crossword puzzle clues.  I found a site online that turns your words and clues into a puzzle for you.  I laid both of these pages out digitally and used a chalkboard background. I painted the wood veneer piece to tie the pink in somewhere.

After I came up with my list of what I wanted to include in my album I decided to lay it out in sections.  One of the sections I wanted to focus on was stuff in and around the 80's, there is so much of me that is directly tied to that period of my life it warrants its own section.  I've been so inspired by some things I've found on Pinterest lately, this one being a major one.  I knew this had to be incorporated in my album some how and I decided to give it a try here.

It took a really long time trying to make this work with my Cameo and after a whole lot of cursing and Googling to find answers that proved it wouldn't work, I made it work.  The program is not equipped to leave cuts open ended like I wanted (the designer software might, but I don't have it).  The original inspiration piece was cut by hand and after all the time it took me trying to make this work I could have cut about 5 of them out. 

If your not familiar, the words are song lyrics from a song featured in the move The Breakfast Club and the Silhouette is of one of the characters from the very end of the film.  A monumental piece of 80's pop culture for sure.

This will lead in to a large section of some of my favorite things from the 80's and what I spent my time doing during that period.  Lots more to come in this section for sure.

I still have lots to do and I'm plugging along as inspiration strikes and time allows.  More to follow for sure.