Laura Vegas

There's big stuff happening over at Kerri Bradford Studio this week! Kerri's store is coming up on it's second birthday. I was a huge fan of Kerri's design style from way back in the day. In fact, I even got to meet Kerri, about four years ago (picture proof HERE). She was one of the biggest reasons I finally bought a Silhouette, and I filled my library up with tons of her designs. When she branched out on her own, I followed. And I was totally honored when she asked me to be a part of her creative team. I just love getting to play with her kits every month.

When Kerri asked if we wanted to do a little extra project for her party, of course I was up for it. My first thought was do a birthday layout, for this birthday celebration. But after all of my CHA work for Bella, I admit, I was a little birthday'd-out. Lol. So I went another route, which is up on her blog today.

This is another set of photos that I swiped from Sarah's iPod a while back. These girls are all of Sarah's closest friends, and they took these photos of themselves (or someone else helped for the group shots, I would assume) at school. They were posing in front of a firetruck that was visiting the school, most likely for a safety day or something. I'm not actually sure who took these photos, but they came from one of the girl's cell phones or iPod's.

I knew these photos would be perfect to use with Fancy Pant's Off To School collection. Fancy Pants is an extremely generous sponsor of the 2012 CK Dream Team, and I am always grateful for the goodies they send us. This was a collection that I was really excited to play with, but I just never seemed to get around to it. I love the aqua and browns in this collection, mixed with the more traditional red and yellow school colors.

I knew I wanted this layout to be more about Sarah and her friends, rather than the fact that they were posing with a firetruck at school. But I also wanted to tie it into a school themed layout, if that makes any sense. I choose this title from Kerri's Graduation kit, and added a little subtitle using some tiny letter stickers from Jillibean Soup.

This layout came about quite a bit differently then most of my layouts. I printed out the photos, without really knowing how they would go on the page. They ended up taking up quite a bit of space, which led me to a more random design. I like the change, from my usual "linear, all lined up" style. I misted my white cardstock before adhered anything, and then ended up covering up most of my good misted areas. I printed my journaling, and then realized how tight the space was, so it got crammed together in order to fit.

I wanted to include the grade Sarah was in when these photos were taken, so I chose her school year from the School Years kit. And because I don't like to have to do the math, when trying to figure out what year corrulates to what school year, I added the actual year (2012) with some tiny number stickers. 

While I was cutting out my title pieces, I also die cut a few stars from each patterned paper, thinking I could work them onto the layout. I believe there are stars in quite a few of Kerri's kit, but my go-to star is from The Ol' Ballgame kit. I wasn't really thinking about how I would use them, or where on the layout, so I made them totally random sizes. No measuring, which is completely unlike me. I decided to add threaded buttons to the centers of the stars, so I wish I had made some of them a bit larger.