Navigating

Sorry for the dry spell here on my blog.  Finally getting my mojo and just overall energy back. I have successfully exited the first trimester of pregnancy and the morning sickness is starting to subside. Just about to hit the halfway mark, so that is why I have been so absent here. Excited to add another baby to the family in April. This will be baby #4!

Here is a layout that I recently completed. This layout is based on a prompt from Ali Edwards' Hello Story class, direction. I wrote the journaling back when I took this class at Big Picture classes, just hadn't paired and printed photos for it.

For this layout I had pulled the Wild Story stamp as well as a Lawn Fawn stamp set that had a compass on it. I pulled the blue background paper because it also looked like it had compass shapes on it. 

When looking for coordinating paper with the blue, I ran across some leftover pieces of a Basic Grey collection that I thought paired well with the color and the overall feeling I wanted to convey with this layout.

If you look closely by the title, I stamped the Lawn Fawn stamp in the compass shape all over the background using a similar blue ink color. Unfortunately most of them were covered up by the photos and journaling.

I created the title using a chipboard alpha from Basic Grey. Framed it with some Studio Calico wood veneer arrows.

Used a Jenni Boland punch for the tabs that house the date the photos were taken.

In with the Basic Grey collection was some decorative border stickers which I used down the page. I layered white card stock to give it a softer feel and have more presence on the page.

On top I used some Heidi Grace Chipboard stickers,  a compass stamped from the Story Stamp set, and another wood arrow. 

Used a roller date stamp phrase but hand wrote my date. I apparently don't have a date stamp that is just month and year. Repeated the other embellishments in this cluster as well.

Here is my journaling. 

This was a hard story to tell, but worthy of being written. It talks about my daughters diagnosis of Down Syndrome and how I navigated that. 

I don't really mention her diagnosis in other layouts, but thought it should be addressed somewhere in our story. 

Thanks for taking a look!

I actually have another layout to share soon. One much less profound :)