Monday, April 14, 2014

Sharing a layout - Scrapbooking an event



ScrapGals has a new podcast posted where we discuss various threads from twopeasinabucket and give our perspective on the issues. In this episode, we discuss a question posted by someone who wondered if anyone still scrapbooks events or theme pages. I decided to make that my first layout to share this week, and it was definitely a challenge.

I realized that I didn't have many current event type photos to make a layout from because I've been doing Project Life. For me, PL is the place that I put most event type items. That meant I needed to check out my backlog of pictures. It's a double-edged sword, you know. I want to use the photos from years past, but I'm often not inspired by those pics and/or the pics themselves either aren't great quality or are the 'wrong' size for whatever I have planned. I decided to charge forward, though.


I found a series of pictures from a visit to my dad's house in NC from about 2004. It was one of the last times the family was all together visiting, so I do look at the pictures fondly because of that. For some reason, neither my brother nor my ex-husband nor I are in the pics from our day of boating even though we were all there. It's not ideal, but it's okay since I mentioned they were there in the journaling. I'm trying to just go with the flow in this process, but it's hard to do sometimes.

I narrowed down my pics into two sections - a day boating on the lake and a day of craftiness as a family. There were 5 boating pics, but I decided not to use one of them because it was poorly composed. (Photo-bombed by a guy in our family - only his side and swim trunks were showing.) Once I'd chosen the four photos, I immediately considered cropping them to 4 X 4 so I could fit everything on a single page layout. I couldn't make it work; I'd zoomed in too much in taking the pics for cropping to be effective.

Maybe a scraplift would help. I looked on my Pinterest scrapbooking board but didn't see anything that was a two page spread that I wanted to lift. Plan B was to look at my sketches board. Bingo! I found a set of sketches from last April from Creating Keepsakes magazine and decided to use that as my guide.


Next up, I looked through my paper stash for something that would evoke feelings of water and/or summer. I found some old paper by fromAtoZ and thought it'd be a good fit. I'm not sure how old it is, but it's several years at least. (This week's podcast also addresses mixing new product with old, so there's a tie-in to that with this layout as well.) There were a couple of circle patterns that felt kind of watery to me as well as some stripes and subtle floral background pieces.  I also took a few minutes to pull some summer themed embellishments that I thought might work. I didn't really have anything specific in mind, but I wanted to have some things out handy to choose from as I worked. (Btw, I guess I should clean off my desk since I'm working in a super tiny space because it's so cluttered right now. haha!)




After arranging the pics on my paper according to the sketch, I needed to find something that would balance out the sides. On the sketch, those are vertical pics. Problem was that I didn't have any vertical pics from that boat trip. Immediately, I realized that PL cards would work there. I started with a couple of 4 X 6 cards but soon realized that I liked the idea of using 3 X 4 cards on the right hand side instead. The Summer line from Simple Stories worked well with the colors of the paper, so I chose that line as my 'embellishment' line. The small dot paper is part of the the same line as my background papers.


While I didn't have a lot of stuff to say about the event, I did want to include a few strips of journaling. Those strips were some scraps I had lying on my desk from a layout a couple of weeks ago. I moved my title to the other side of the layout from the sketch, so I did modify it some. The little title stickers are Jillibean Soup; the larger letters are old American Crafts.


To balance the layout, I included journaling strips and patterned paper 'flags' on both sides of the layout. The 'flags' are made out of the same patterned paper that lines the bottom of the photo grid.



Here's the finished layout:

A more close-up view...

And the view from a few feet back...  (sorry for the glare)

Hope you have a chance to listen to our podcast and to do some event based scrapbooking of your own. Thanks for stopping by - now go and be crafty!

3 comments:

  1. LOL! I ended my blog post today with "go and be crafty." Great minds think alike. :) This is awesome. Really I love how it came together and you are rockin' blogging your process. I love every thing you have to say! So fascinating to know someone's process. I need to do more of that.

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  2. I really like how you used two different papers for the backgrounds. I've been wanting to try that, and I think it really worked with your layout! Thanks for the inspiration!

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  3. I love how you mixed old with new and different product lines. Love the result.

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