Happy April everyone!  Hope you are enjoying your month so far! Out of curiosity I have to ask, are you playing along with the challenges over at The Sweet Shoppe?  I don’t know about you, but I am really bad about collecting LOTS of gorgeous kits, but then not really doing anything with them.  I want to make pages, but life just gets in the way.

Challenges offer not only some inspiration, but a good bit of motivation for me as well.  I find that when I am struggling to get pages done, or even just to use the kits I have bought, looking through challenge prompts helps get me started, even if I decide not to play along.  And the added bonus, if you do play along you get PRIZES! If you didn’t know about the challenges, you can check them out here.

Every month there are new ones, and always lots of options to choose from. It is really fun, you should give them a go.

This month there is a prompt that says “be inspired: board games” When I saw it I immediately thought of the Fun and Games Kit in the DSI store!  To make things even more exciting – my boys went to a board game tournament at a local mall this month.  Talk about great timing.

So this week I thought I would take you on a walkthrough of the page I made documenting their tourney experience for the April Challenges.

I started with the Life Captured April Templates because they are one of my all-time favorite template sets.  After looking at what pictures I had to work with, I decided I needed to alter the template a little.  If you have never done this I encourage you to think about it – altering your templates gives them so much more versatility.  For this page, I turned off a few layers and duplicated a few others, rearranged some photo spaces as needed and came up with a plan that worked for my photos and my story. Here is a side by side comparison.

Once I got that settled I added my photos.  Since I have younger kids, I was not able to go to the tournament myself, but one of our friends took lots of pictures for me to use.  Unfortunately the colors were muddy and there was very little contrast because the tourney was held in a poorly lit space.  I decided to convert the photos to black and white so that I could boost the contrast and try and bring out the important things I wanted to highlight about the weekend.

I had an additional photo of my Hubby (who won his game) that I took when he got home, the colors were better on that photo so I left it in color and put it in the center of the layout as a way of making it a focal point of the page.

Then I added papers and journal cards to the remaining spots.  I decided to turn off the layer immediately adjacent to my hubby’s main picture and just journal directly on the background paper, as doing that provided more space for me to work with.

Next came the elements.  Since the majority of my photos are VERY busy and full I went minimal on the elements, just a few things here and there to provide interest or add to the story.

Finally, all that was left was the journaling and such, which were pretty easy to add.  And we are done!

I love when the challenge prompts bring an idea to mind quickly, it really helps the process along.

So if you have not already, I encourage you to check out the Challenges over at Sweet Shoppe, even if just for a spot of inspiration in your memory keeping this month!