Creating with Connie

I have been traveling a lot lately. Usually, I visit Boston 2-4 times a year to visit my daughter at college. I usually bring my Nook to continue whatever book I am reading. I also tend to break up the trip (5 -6 1/2 hours depending on direction and winds) to catch up on magazines.

 Recently, I was reading some scrapbook magazines. One had many layouts with creative clusters. These clusters were smaller photos, words, images, ephemera. Interestingly, these clusters were in random vertical and horizontal strips.The strips were placed in various locations on the pages and were floating. I am not a big fan of floating - images not grounded to an edge/other image. I am sure you have seen this before - random diagonals on a collage card, ATC, canvas. Or, floating clusters on a scrapbook page.
These combinations of ungrounded clusters were quite distracting to me. One friend once told me she thought people did that to be "artsy". I do not know about that. Each page contained one or two photos at most, but quite a few clusters...

Scrapbooking is not my number one hobby. I enjoy it, but not as much as stamping and mixed media. When I do scrap, I tend to keep things simple with clean lines.

For me, this way of scrapping keeps the focus on the photos of the memory that I am showcasing. After all, most people tend to look at photo albums to see if they or someone they know are in the photos. I try to make it easy for them.

So, in looking at the featured layouts, did I focus on the photos? Not at all. Yet, is not that why many of us scrapbook?