First Days of School-Aaron

This layout was inspired by a Refresh Retreat challenge from May of last year. The challenge was to combine 9 or more versions of a similar style of photo to help visually tell a story. My son resent my graduated high school and I thought it would cool to get all of his first day of school photos on a layout!

I used Simple Scrapper sketch 717 and decided to put these plastic slide frames that have been in my stash a long time to good use. 

I struggled with using the sketch a bit, since all of my photos were vertical. But with some friends at an in person crop and moving things around quite a few times (which also meant reframing many photos) I finally came up with a composition that worked for me.

 

Used Jillibean Soup’s Alphabet Soup II collection for paper and die cuts that matched well with the stickers.

I had some stickers in my stash that had labels that fit on the slide frames perfectly and had the title piece to match. 

Love seeing these photos all together to see the growth year after year. 

Who What Where When Why

The layout I am sharing today was inspired by Ali Edwards’ Hello Story class for the lesson on Who What When Where and How. I used the digitals from the class to cut the circles to house my photos.

I used some diamonds from the pattern paper to create embellishments on the page.

Finished off the clusters with some enamel shapes.

 Despite having a ton more photos for this trip, I love this snapshot and having this documented!

House Rules

This is a layout I finished a while ago but never shared. This layout was inspired by Ali Edwards Hello Story class last prompt- Rules for Living. The Story Stamp for Black and White contained a perfect stamp with the House Rules sentiment.

The sketch was Simple Scrapper sketch 288 and used supplies from Vicki Boutin's Discover and Create collection. 

Loved using the 6x6 supplies from a SCT Sampler kit for this one!

Here are those stamps in action, creating a border at the bottom of the page.

Loved getting this story told, finishing up layouts from the Hello Story Class and using more of my stash!

 

How I Met Your Father

 For an in person crop I had recently, I did not prepare very well in advance and was looking for layouts I could make without the need of printing photos. 

I ran across the story of how I may have met my husband as a photo-less story and started to look for supplies to kit it up. Originally it had been a layout I had brainstormed for the First Story Stamp- back with the first ever Story Kit, but when I looked at the stamps, they weren’t quite right for the story. 

I shifted to the Begin and Start Story Stamps and Kits (I happened to pick those up in sales) and found the perfect cards in the Start Kit to tell my story. 

I matched the cards up with some mixed media papers from Vicki Boutin that coordinated well, and decided I wanted to cut the title from the show “how I met your mother” font. Happy there was also a “how I met your father” show as well so I could just pull it in with no design work on my part!

I cut the title from black cardstock 4 times and packed that with a coordinating VB thicker set that I liked the arrows on and a 49 and Market die cut pack. 

I debated if it was going to be too much typography with the cards and the title with no photos to break it up, but I like the pieces so I went with it.

At this point I had just read Spark Magazine and saw the Refresh challenge and thought this layout would be a good contender for it since I only had 5 things pulled for the kit.

I love how it came together, that this story is now told, and bonus that I bashed pieces of the Start Story Kit while completing a challenge!

Baby’s First Christmas- Rosie

The layout I am sharing today is for my daughter's baby album. I wanted to document her first Christmas and I had made base pages using a Christmas collection from The Girls Paperie quite a few year back. 

I loved this collection when I bought around 2011 and still do. I especially loved the layered snowflake embellishments that came with this collection. I didn't want quite as much dimension so I removed a few layers of foam adhesive. 

I recently took inventory of predesigned page kits, layouts from classes I had taken that didn't have photos or a story associated, and layouts I had started and never got stories paired with them. I have a list of layouts I want to include in the baby album, so I went through that inventory to match them up. I was super excited to get this base layout used up!

I struggled on where to put the journaling for this layout and decided to print it on velum and layer it on the top of the left page. It is much more legible in person.

 I used the sticker book for the alpha stickers used in the title, as well as the labels for each of the photos.

Love pairing this old base layout with a project I am currently working on, especially one that I still really love!

Thanks for stopping by!