Going Home

I know that many scrapbookers have been recording the COVID pandemic in their scrapbooks. It’s hard to not have COVID creep into the scrapbooks when it has had such a tremendous and long-lasting reach into all of our lives.

Our family was hit hard with COVID. Caleb, Zach and I all tested positive for the virus in August of 2021. With the exception of a minor sore throat, Zach was pretty much asymptomatic. Caleb ran a low temperature and was tired and achy, but I ended up with severe COVID pneumonia in both lungs. I waited longer than I should have to go to the hospital, but I didn’t want to leave my two sick kids. When my husband finally got me to the hospital, my oxygen was reading in the low 40’s.

I was admitted to the ICU and spent 10 days there before coming home! Doctors had been very cautious not to give my family and me any false timeline as to when I would be strong enough to go home. The morning I was discharged, my doctor came to my room on her rounds and asked if I wanted to go home! They hooked me up to my dose of IV medications, ordered oxygen for me to take home, and started the paperwork.

Unfortunately, there was a lot of hurry up and wait. I was dressed and ready to go long before my paperwork was. I took these selfies and sent them to my mom and Jim while I was waiting. I hadn’t showered and washed my hair in 10+ days, and I felt disgusting, but I love my smile. I was so truly grateful to be going home. I had no idea until my follow up appointments, just how sick I was, but I have a new appreciation for my life and my health – and that definitely was worth a scrapbook layout!

Scrapbooking Tips

This layout perfectly demonstrates the concept of creating a visual triangle on your layout. Visual triangles are used by interior decorators and graphic designers. Basically, for scrapbooking, you place three elements around the page in such a way where they create points of an invisible triangle.

This is important because it helps create balance and it actually helps guide our eyes around all the elements of a layout. There can also be more than one visual triangle.

In this layout, I placed three stickers on the layout to form a triangle. The first sticker you see is the orange “Stay Positive” sticker. Then your eye might go to the hat sticker (which I thought was appropriate because it said, “Covid Hair I don’t Care”) then down towards the title with the masked smiley face sticker.

You might already be using visual triangles unconsciously, but I guarantee that when you start purposely using this design concept, your layouts will look more balanced and professional.

Supplies Used:

Cardstock: Bazzill

Pattern Paper and Stickers: Photo Play

Title: Thickers from American Crafts

Embroidery Floss: Hobby Lobby