Laura Vegas

i think this is going to be a good week on the blog, my friends! i actually have layouts/cards to share every day this week. including saturday. should make up a little bit for the last few slow weeks over here 😉

{click to see larger}

lately, i've really been wanting to scrap a few events, get-togethers, birthdays, and things like that. these are all layouts where i know that i have TONS of photos to choose from, and i want to make sure and get as many as i can onto my layouts.

this is where i get hung up though. i have been struggling to figure out exactly how i want to go about scrapping these photos. do i want to use divided page protectors, and keep it pretty simple? do i come up with a page design, and then size all my photos accordingly, print them out, and trim them up? do i just do a quick print at costco, trim them all myself, and just do my best to fit them on the page? do i create digital layouts? do i create photo collages and print as one large photo? i can't tell you how many times i have debated back and forth on these ideas. on a whim this weekend, i went with the last idea, for the photos from this family get-together from a while back.

i have a TON of digital templates from janet phillips, thanks to an amazing black friday sale i came across last thanksgiving. i love that she has so many two page templates. sure, you can take one or two collages, and use them together for a two page layout. but for some reason, that's not always as easy as it sounds, to make them look cohesive. i love that these are designed with the two pages in mind, so that they flow together so nicely. i started with this template here, which holds 23 photos.

here's how my template looked, once i got all of my photos dropped in. for a few minutes, i debated actually making this a digital layout. but i had some papers picked out already, and really wanted to do a real paper layout. so i figured i would just print out the photo part of this design. it was late at night, and i didn't want to wait to upload and order this from costco, which would be my first way of printing something like this. so i decided to play with this, and see if i could print it myself.

i started by taking off all of the other elements in this digital design. i deleted the side papers, the bracket, and the title. so i was left with what you see here. just the photos, all pretty in their collage.

these templates are set up as a 24"x12" image. so i knew i had to break this into two pages, in order to print. i simply cropped the two pages out seperately, both at 12"x12". here is the first page of the spread.

and here is the second page of the spread. the next thing i did was to resize this down to an 11"x11" image. i knew i was printing this out at home, and i can only print 8.5"x11" on my photo printer. i wasn't sure what the final dimensions would be on the actual photo part of the page, but figured i could easily take off an inch to help bring the size down a bit for starters.

then i cropped out JUST the photo part of the page, leaving a bit of a border around the edges. i copied and pasted that onto an 8.5"x11" canvas, and the photo collage fit perfectly on there. what you see here, is what i printed out. i did the same thing for the first page. if the collage had been too big, i would have just adjusted it to fit the page. {i did this same trick for another layout that i'll share tomorrow, and i'll explain how i had to resize it even more before i was able to print}

and here is how they look on my layout. the first page.

and the second page.

a reminder of what the pages look like together. i love how the photo collage flows so nicely on the two pages. fancy pants is a generous sponsor of the CK dream team, and i just love getting their boxes with the new collections. last week, one showed up on my doorstep, and it included the new wave searcher collection, which is what i used for this layout.

one thing that i love about doing these layouts just for fun, and not to meet any design team or magazine requirements, is that i can include some older products here and there. remember these plastic letters from heidi swapp? from years and years ago? i have a TON of these, and used to hoard them, claiming they were "too special" to use. goofy, i know.

fiskars is another super generous sponsor of the CK dream team, and just sent over a box of new punches last week. i used the groovy rainbow interchangeable punch, which works with the interchangeable punch starter set, on some of the brown distressed pattern paper. i love that these punches take up so much less space, and the interchangeable pieces stack up so nicely together. you just snap in the one you want to use, and you're ready to go. so easy.

here, i combined two of my favorite embellishments that fancy pants has in their collections. the chipboard banner stickers and the buttons. i'm a huge fan of both of these.

overall, it's a pretty basic layout. the photo collages take up a lot of the space on the pages, so there's not a lot of room left that you have to fill up. but i find that for layouts based on holidays, events, vacations, etc … anything where you have TONS of photos … photo collages are the way to go. at least, for me they are. i absolutely love that i fit 23 photos on this layout! i had a small handful of photos that didn't make the cut for this layout. but they were all about the food we ate that day. i decided to make that a page of it's own, and i'll be sharing that tomorrow ;)  change of plans: will share that layout on friday.