100 Moments: Moment #1

I'm a pretty fast scrapper--I get an idea, I grab product, I grab photos, and go. True, sometimes I need to let things sit so I can think about the design or what I want to say, but most of this time I don't spend a lot of time fretting about my choices.

This next layout, though, took me a week. I knew it was special to me when I thought of it, so I took some time with it.

I got the idea for this page from Jen Mohler's 100 most important moments in your life spark she introduced at Big Picture Scrapbooking's Big Idea Festival. I made my list of moments at my son's tae kwon do class. The hardest thing was getting them in order when I was done with the list! That and figuring out what's been important most recently. Having to put our dog down I saw as significant, of course, but sometimes we need the perspective of time to gauge the true significance of things. That's why I'm glad to go back and scrap older photos sometimes--or scrap the same photos!

Even before making the list I knew this moment was number 1. It's one of my earliest memories, and it was a learning experience, both about the world and about me. And my mother recently sent me photos from my first 3 years of life, and what did I find in there? Pictures from the preschool where it happened, and an Easter shot that may have been from this very event! Priceless. So here's my layout:



The hardest thing for me was picking product. I wanted something vintage-y but not too grunge-y. I have been scrapping with a lot of bright colors lately, so it was hard for me to shift gears. I knew I wanted two pages, I knew I wanted white space, and I knew I didn't want typical Easter colors or product either. October Afternoon's Thrift Shop became the anchor paper for me; the yellow paper took me a while to settle on, but this yellow Basic Grey paper from Nook and Pantry worked great. I also got some good use out of an old Daisy D's piece of blue distressed paper.

This design is an old one for me; I've used it before. It works, though! So no guilt. The greatest find for me came when I went though my red paper scraps and found an old piece of Sassafras paper with frames on it. Some worked thematically with the page, so I cut them out and used them. I set them on pop dots to make them stand out. If you click on the photo, you'll see the right one says "Bunny"!

Here's the journaling, in case you can't read it:

One of my earliest memories is at Sunday school in Niagara, New York, in 1975. (It may have been preschool, and it may have been Grand Island. My memory is fuzzy.) Around Easter the class was given a craft to make: the boys would make bunny ears and the girls would make Easter bonnets. I’ve never been a girly-girl; I wanted to make the ears but was told the girls couldn’t. This may have been my first experience with discrimination based on gender, and I remember I tried to fight against it.'

Unfortunately, I don’t remember how the story turned out, but when I told my mother this story she said she knew—because she still had the ears! Not only my first experience combating unfairness, but an early experience in my being stubborn too.

So that's the 1st most important moment in my life--the year I was told I had to make a bonnet because I was a girl, and I said no.