Laura Vegas

I had a new layout go up over at Kerri Bradford Studio over the weekend. I spent some time digging around my external hard drive a while back, taking notes of photos that I would like to scrap. A lot of them are ones that I have never used before, but I had some on my list that have shown up on a layout somewhere along the line. I have scrapped some of these photos of Sarah and her Teddy years ago, for a Creating Keepsakes assignment. I never really loved the layout, since I was asked to do specific things that I wouldn't normally do. So I have no problem scrapping these photos again.

I started out by cutting a open heart background, from Kerri's Heart Backgrounds kit. I cut it from white cardstock, and then adhered it onto another sheet of white cardstock. The white-on-white makes for a nice subtle background. I spritzed the entire piece with some tan mist, and then adhered it to a sheet of green cardstock, and machine stitched all the way around.

Brush script has been a huge trend these days in scrapbooking. I'm not about to try my own hand at it, so I was excited to see that Kerri came out with her Something To Say kit, which consists of ten hand-painted brush script words/phrases. I choose the "gotta love this" and cut it nice and large from both brown cardstock and a tone-on-tone tan dotted patterned paper. I really think brush script words/phrases are meant to be big and bold. Love the look. 

I wanted to use one of the negative strips from Kerri's new Click kit, and choose the one with three openings. This allowed my photos to be roughly 2×3" in size (give or take a bit). I had a few additional photos that I had wanted to use, but I also didn't want to end up with super tiny photos. So I will most likely just add a divided page protector right next to this layout in Sarah's album, and slip the rest of the photos in.

I really debated if I should machine stitch around the negative strip or not. I didn't want to start and end up not liking it, since I really didn't want to have to cut out the piece again. I went ahead with it, since I think that a good amount of machine stitching on any project just gives it a more "finished" look.

Did you know that you can also use Kerri's shapes to print onto your photos, or even for digital scrapping? Her kits all come with the "PNG" versions of the shapes, and you can pull those right into Photoshop, treating it just like a digital element. I added the "this look", also from the Click kit, to my main photo, changing the color to a dark brown.

I kept the embellishments pretty simple to finish off the page. Most of my page consisted of browns, greens, and white, and I felt like it needed one more color added in. I came across a few embellishmens from Basic Grey that had a rusty orange color, so I decided to go with that. I wasn't sure if I should use two different pieces right next to each other that said "you & me" (the chipboard and the flag), but they had the colors I wanted, so I just went with it. I added in a few other buttons from Stampin Up and Jenni Bowlin, to go with the nice orange one from Basic Grey.