Laura Vegas

Remember when I was on this kick of "Tackling Christmases Past"? I didn't forget about it, even though it's been about three and a half months since I shared a few layouts from this project. I shared my first two double page spreads HERE, and shared my second two double page spreads HERE. And then I got sidetracked with CHA work and the Creative Team call at Bella Blvd, and everyday life. But it's still on my to-do list, and I managed to knock out two more layouts last week.

And those two layouts are up at Kerri Bradford Studio today. This first layout covers Christmas morning, 2010. We always open gifts with just the four of us on Christmas morning. Unless the girls are with Alyssa's dad's family, then we'll do them later that evening.

I used one of Kerri's templates from her Storyboard #2 kit to create my photo collage. I don't usually take that many photos Christmas morning, now that the girls are older. Just a small sampling. Always a few of just the girls together, and I try my best to make sure Joe and I get in at least one photo.

I chose my title from Kerri's Merry Everything kit, and cut the "under the tree" from a red "joy" patterned paper from Studio Calico and a black chalkboard type patterned paper I had some scraps of. I also added a small strip of black star patterned paper from Studio Calico along the top of the page, and the green dot and aqua patterned papers are from Simple Stories.

I added a 3×4" card from Simple Stories in the upper left corner of the page, and then dug into my stash of Christmas embellishments. I ended up using some super old metal embellishments from Making Memories, along with their older chipboard buttons.

These photos are from the second half of Christmas morning, 2009. I know we had opened gifts with just the four of us that morning at the house. But then we went to drop the girls off with Alyssa's dad, to go celebrate with his family, and that is where they were given their big gifts, which were from Alyssa's dad, Joe, and myself.

I had cut the circle background, from Kerri's Life Additions: Backgrounds kit, out of white cardstock for an entirely different layout. One that never worked out. So I decided to use it on this layout. And somehow I ended up using a shimmery sheet of green cardstock for the base of my page. I rarely ever use solid colored cardstock, as I really love my white.

Once again, I used one of Kerri's templates from her Storyboard #2 kit to create my photo collage. The same template that I used for the first layout, in fact. I have another layout that I really want to make one of these days, related to when I posted these photos on my blog that year. It's a funny story, but it deserves a layout of it's own.

Once again, I chose my title from Kerri's Merry Everything kit, and cut it from the same black chalkboard patterned paper used on the first layout. As usual, I lost the dots to my i's, so I used some enamel dots to dot them. The red dotted patterned paper is a really old paper from Scenic Route.

I dug into my stash of Christmas embellishments, and ended up using these super old glitter foam tree and star stickers from Making Memories. This is also the only layout, out of the six layouts I've done, that I included journaling on. I haven't felt like any of the others really needed anything said, but wanted to include a little text on this one.

Once again, just like I mentioned when I shared my last two Christmas layouts, I almost got hung on these layouts. Thinking they looked a little plain and pretty similar to the previous four layouts (even though these are one pagers). 

And once again, I had to remind myself that I'm totally fine with these layouts looking similar in design. That's the beauty of not feeling like I have to re-invent the wheel on all of these Christmas layouts. The entire point was to take something that I don't necessarily enjoy scrapping, and get-it-done. And that's exactly what I'm doing.