An external hard drive which contained photos from the last 10 years failed about a month ago and it’s been crippling regarding my memory-keeping. I talked about what happened on Instagram so I won’t go into it again here, except to remind everyone: Please check your backups!

I’m creating with the current photos I have on my phone and what was left on my camera cards while I wait on whether any of my data can be recovered. The failed hard drive is now with a data recovery lab.

Anyway, onto scrappy talk… 🙂

Here is my spread for week 20:

I just received the gorgeous TN kit from Kelly Purkey and chose to use these cards for the spread. The cards in this kit are thick and good quality, but I find I don’t actually use them that much in my traveler’s notebooks because they add more bulk than I’d like, and I also don’t seem to use much patterned paper in notebooks anyway.

I stuck with the overall color palette from the TN kit, cutting down the papers to add color to some plain journaling cards. I added a few cards I had from previous Studio Calico kits to fill out the remaining 3×4″ pockets.

I wanted to tell the story of my hard drive failure (kind of a Big Deal!) but since I can be a little wordy and it wasn’t going to fit on a 3×4″ card, I chose to make a fun pocket to hold this story. I printed the text on white cardstock, sized to slightly less than 2 3×4″ cards and adhered these to the front and back of a colored 3×4″ card. I created a tab that I stapled on so it could be pulled from the pocket and stamped “Yikes/UGH” from some Ali Edwards stamps I had.

For the pocket itself, I cut out the gold “the worst” phrase from a 4×6″ SC card and sewed it onto a piece of vellum. I then sewed the vellum along 3 of the edges to the 4×6″ backing card to complete the pocket.

The embellishments are a mix of stickers (Studio Calico, Elle’s Studio) and wood veneer (Felicity Jane, Gossamer Blue).

I love the way this spread came out, even if it documented one horrible story!