Take a Chill Pill

...'Cause it's Relaxation Day! True story. And we're celebrating Relaxation Day with our newest challenge at How Much Is Too Much. Anna-Karin came up with a clever challenge:

- About something that you find relaxing.
- Close your eyes and dig into your stash of scrap patterned papers and randomly pick out at 6 or more pieces of papers and use those on your layout. No peeking!
- Do the same thing and pick 10 or more random buttons, ribbons or pearls.
- Use 3 bits and pieces lying around on your desk (not patterned papers). If you have a clean desk, use 3 left-overs from your last project.
- 1 recycled item

I used this sketch from Creative Scrappers as a starting point (ever since I got on the Creative Scrappers design team, I set a scrappy goal to make a layout for each of their sketches):

Here's the page I came up with:

I have to confess that I do not really love my page, but I did have lots of fun making it.

I scratched my head when I read the second two requirements. I have all my scraps organized by manufacturer in files with the whole sheets, and my embellishments are also very organized, so trying to just reach in and grab wasn't going to be an option.

Here's what I decided I'd do: I run a challenge at 2Peas called The Stash Challenge, so I have lists of manufacturers and types of embellishments on my computer that I use to draw from when I post the challenges. I used Random.org to pick random numbers, and then I counted down the lists. Here's what I came up with for paper manufacturers: Luxe Designs, Sassafras Lass, SEI, Paper Salon, Scenic Route, and American Crafts. My embellishments were lace, baker's twine, weather accents, charms, bird, decorative brads, flowers, swirls, epoxy stickers, stamp.

Fi Kenward, Tracee Provis, and I were video-chatting on Skype as we were picking our embellishments, so we could check up on each other and make sure we wouldn't cheat! What I did, once I had my lists was go to my manufacturer folders and randomly pull scraps. Such an odd assortment of papers! Similarly, with the embellishments, I went to the particular drawer holding that type of embellishment, closed my eyes, and pulled. When I got to the "weather related" accent, I realized I didn't have those housed together, so I asked Tracee to pick a number between 1 and 130 (the number of little drawers of embellishments I have), and she said 75. My 75th drawer had metal rimmed tags.

Here are a few details. That button was in the same drawer with my epoxy stickers, and that's what I randomly drew out of that drawer. Here's a shot of some of the papers. The woodgrain is Luxe Designs; the yellow polka dot is Sassafras Lass; the turqouise is SEI; and pink and brown circles were punched out of a Paper Salon paper, and the black and white rings came from a Scenic Route Halloween paper. The red leaves were leftover from the last layout and counted for the 3 bits and pieces lying around on my desk (oops--I just read that those weren't supposed to be patterned papers--does it count as cheating if you didn't mean to cheat?).

The rub-ons are old BasicGrey ones. The pearls were on my desk from my last layout. I always wanted to get a picture of me in front of the computer because I do spend a lot of time there, and I just got a web cam last weekend, so that's where my picture came from. I was so frustrated because my printer was acting up and I couldn't get a proper print, but in the end, I decided it was okay, since it was for Relaxation Day.

The little heart is my item that came from my charm drawer--it's actually a button. And here you can see that I drew a pink metal-rimmed tag. And the punched birds came from my drawer of bird accents. The striped paper is the B side of the teal paper.

This picture shows my bit of lace that I drew out of my lace jar. My recycled item is also in this picture--the blac-and-white scalloped bit is from a package of Chatterbox stickers that was sitting on my desk. And the MOD brad was the one I drew from one of my decorative brad drawers.

So there you have my page for Relaxation Day. I assure you that even if this sounds stressful (as it did to me when I first realized I was going to give up control over what was going on my page), it turned out to be GREAT fun! I always love a good challenge--and this one was definitely a challenge! I hope you'll give it a whirl! Come see the awesome stuff my teammates made!

Thank you for stopping by my blog and reading about my page!