Laura Vegas

It's the second Tuesday of the month, which means that we have the new monthly project sheet up over on the Bella Blvd blog. For this month's layout, I was asked to create a layout using square photos from my Instagram feed and to incorporate the new Clear Cuts specialty papers onto my page.

I don't have a super impressive or pretty Instagram feed, so I wasn't really sure what I would do for this layout to be honest. I really try to do layouts that mean something to me as much as I can, so I didn't want to put something together just to put something together. Know what I mean?

A while back I had printed out all of the photos from my Instagram feed where I had used the hashtag #alyssasenioryear, with the intention of doing a layout with them. So I decided to go with these photos for this layout, although I only used about 1/3 of the original photos.

The ones I choose are a good representation of her senior year, although I did have two more that I really wanted to include. The first day of school photo and a photo from graduation. If this was a layout just for me, where I could really do whatever I wanted, I would have included them, and they would have fit into the page design perfectly. But for a project sheet, it would have been too photo heavy.

Once I knew the theme of my layout and had my photos picked out, it really helped narrow down my paper choices. Green, white, and black are our school colors, so those were a given. And I had touches of yellow in a few photos, so I tossed that in as well.

I love the green woodgrain patterned paper from the Campout collection, and used it as the background paper for my layout. I layered the white Confetti Clear Cut specialty paper right on top.

I added a little adhesive along the top and bottom of the dotted transparency, as I knew I was going to add a thin strip of the black text patterned paper along those same edges, which would cover up the adhesive.

This upper left corner was where I was originally going to put my two extra photos, which I had printed as 3×3" photos. I was going to stack them, one above the other, up to the top of the black text paper strip. By not including those photos, it allowed me some extra room for this fun sticker to hold my journaling.

I printed all of my photos as two inch squares. Actually, what I ended up doing was creating two 4×6" collages, each holding six two inch square photos. So once I had printed them and trimmed them down, I only had two "photos" to adhere. If you were to print them all individually, you would just adhered them side by side, across the page. Printing some of them together just makes it a little quicker.

I adhered them to a piece of yellow diagonal striped patterned paper from the Color Chaos collection, which I then adhered onto a piece of white grid patterned paper, from the Star Student collection. Since I knew the general area where this strip of photos would be on my page, I had also added adhesive behind this area on the dotted Clear Cut, when I adhered it to the green woodgrain paper.

For my title, I used a mix of the white Amorie chipboard alphas and the black alpha stickers from the Color Chaos collection. I had left enough room on the white grid patterned paper to add the "instagram" part of my title, and then added the "senior year" directly above it.

Then I added additional chipboard pieces, a few extra stickers, some crochet hearts, and some enamel stars. I even added some chipboard pieces to a few of the photos, where I had a little empty space to work with. It's a bit more embellishments than I would normally use, but I think it turned out to be a fun layout.

You can download the March project sheet, complete with full supply list and step-by-step instructions, RIGHT HERE.