Happy Rachel

This photo is from the 14th August 2014, when I realised I had a place at the University of York. I was ecstatic, even then. Hence why I'm so bummed out about this year.

In terms of scrapping this picture, I didn't really have any embellishments to go with the colours in the picture, so I started pulling different pieces of patterned paper out of my stash. My stash is basically just a pile of papers that came free in magazines, so to find things that match can be somewhat of a novelty sometimes. These just ended up on top of each other, and after I'd messed around with the proportions, I came across this design. I still haven't added the journalling yet, but that will go on the gridded card tucked into the left hand side. 

To be honest, because I love the photograph so much, the lack of embellishments doesn't bother me that much at all.

Do you get that? When a photo is just too nice to overpower?

Creative Outlet: Swing Dance

In my first term, I joined the Swing Dance Society. I miss it so much. 

For those of you who don't know, swing dance covers the period of dance from the 1920s to the late 1940s, including Charleston and Lindy Hop. It's a period of social dancing, and we emulate this today at our swing society by not dancing with the same partner for more than five minutes.

The photo here was taken during one of our Halloween workshops. Here we were attempting a dance called 'Psychic Lindy', whereby we were not allowed to communicate to our partner, nor were we allowed to hold hands. The hold is usually key for the lead to tell the follower what's going on, but here we had to focus on the body language of the lead and predict what was going to happen. As a follower myself, this was definitely brain taxing, but it made it all the more clearer as to what signs and signals to look out for when doing regular swing techniques.

As the photo was quite dark and busy, I kept the layout quite light and simplistic. Everything but the title and background paper came from my stash - I've had the large silver heart for about eight years! I still need to add the journalling, but otherwise this page sums everything up beautifully.

How do you document your hobbies? How often do you try to use up your stash?