A Love Story…

My hubby and I have recently been on a long weekend away without our children. Most of the time we are so focused on them that we forget about each other, so our recent break from them gave us new focus and made us realise that time to ourselves is important. While we were away I posted a photo on Instagram with the hashtag #inloveagain, and our friends who we were away with told us to ‘get a room’, ‘stop being soppy’ and generally made fun of us for the rest of the holiday (!) but it made me want to scrap about us and tell some of the stories that I know well but have never scraped, from our early years. We are approaching 10 years together so it is a nice time to look back and get those stories recorded.
I chose to use the Jubilee Collection by My Mind’s Eye for these layouts and in particular the ‘Mint Julep’ range with a focus on the ‘Journey’ journalling cards.  The pack contains loads of single sided 3×4″ journalling cards, in both landscape and portrait orientation, as well as a few 3×3″ die cut squares that have different patterns in them or words. Given that my layouts were intended to be journalling heavy, rather than photo heavy, using a whole pack of journalling cards seemed like a good idea.
Going back in time to the beginning of our relationship, sadly means there are few photos. It’s only been 10 years but even then digital photography wasn’t what it is today and we didn’t have camera phones, oh and I wasn’t really a scrapbooker (I was dabbling) so neither of us were very snap-happy. It would also have been a bit weird to be taking photos on the night we first met, on our first date,  of our first kiss etc – he would have thought I was a right weirdo and not married me! So I have gathered as many photos of us in our early days as I’ve got and I’ve just had to work with those. Even though the photos may not be from the actual date of the story I’m telling, they are photos nonetheless and it is the stories I’m focusing on really, the photos just help give the story a visual.
I’ve actually already scrapped the story of how we met so these layouts are of some of the other little stories from our early days. This one relates to our 18 months of long-distance relationship before we finally moved in together. The Jubilee ‘Mint Julep’ collection is just gorgeous – it isn’t a love themed line but has gorgeous colours with a splash of foiled gold here and there and it also contains hearts and ‘&’ signs which go pretty well with my theme of these layouts. I’ve used papers from the collection as well as the flair badges, ephemera pack, the journalling cards, and enamel dots and shapes on my further layouts. I’ve thrown in a Studio Calico gold doily too.

My favourite layout of the four is this double spread which tells the story of our first ‘I love yous’. I bought two sheets of that gold hearts foiled paper which had the coloured arrows on the back. I chopped one sheet up and stuck it back together again to give myself a varied background. I used six of the journalling cards to write my story and used more of them to go behind my photos as layers. I’ve also used one of the die-cut frame squares that came in with the Journalling cards, as an embellishment.

I really loved those die-cut frames that came in with the Journalling cards so I backed them with coloured papers and arranged them on to a fairly plain background (Simple Stories). I picked out a bold journalling card, used two others behind my photo, and used a large 3×4 die-cut frame that came in the ephemera pack (the ‘hello I love you’ card on the right). This layout tells the story of our little love notes we used to leave to each other (ahh we were so cute back then!) so I wanted that ‘hello I love you’ card to be subtle (like it was one of our notes) and therefore I didn’t back it.

and my final layout tells the story of our first date. Again I’ve used the Mint Julep papers, journalling cards, ephemera pack, flair, enamel dots and decorative brads.

You can find all the products I’ve used above linked here:
My Minds Eye Jubilee Collection: papers, Wild Flair Badges, Beautiful Mixed Bag Emphemera pack, Journey Journalling cards, Ride Decorative Brads, Enamel Dots & Wild Enamel Shapes
Studio Calico Lemonlush Gold Doilies
Various Thickers
Studio Calico Essentials Gold Cameras
Hey Little Magpie Flair badges
Happy scrapping xx