Laura Vegas

Happy National Scrapbook Day!!! It's pretty cool that this hobby of ours has a special day dedicated to it each year. I know that there are a ton of sites that are doing fun and cool things today, and I wanted to mention two of those sites that I contributed too. Over on the Scrapbook & Cards Today blog, you'll find twelve straight hours of posts, with a new project and giveaways every hour on the hour. I'll have a project in there that I'll be sharing next week.

And on the Bella Blvd blog, we're doing eleven straight hours of posts, with a total of seventeen new layouts being shared from seventeen of our Creative Team members, and four giveaways spread out throughout the day. I wanted to share my layout here with you today.

I asked our designers to create "all about me" layouts, so that we could get to know them all a little better. I love asking my team to create these layouts every NSD, and seeing what they come up with.

And for me? Well, I wasn't sure what I was going to do for my layout at first. Until I was browsing in my Silhouette library for a totally different project and came across this "oh snap" title. It reminded me of a layout I started years ago, where I had die cut a similar title with my Silhouette, but never finished the layout.

The fact that the photos were already printed was a huge plus! I had originally planned on placing my three 3×4" photos across the page, and this ended up being perfect for a title that popped into my head. I used Bella's Sienna chipboard alphas to spell out "the struggle is real" (which btw, fit perfectly), and added my die cut "oh snap" directly above.

When I started this layout forever and a day ago (hence the curly hair, which I haven't had for years and miss desperately), I was going to journal about my struggle with photography. And oddly, it hasn't changed in the last few years.

You can probably just read my journaling, but basically I used to be able to take out my camera and take great photos without even thinking about it. For the last few years, I take out my camera, use all of the same settings, and end up with terrible photos. Mostly for indoors. I can do outdoor photos just fine. I tend to get frustrated and put the camera away. Seems like I never have the time (or think to make the time) to get in there and figure out what I'm doing wrong.

I kept this layout pretty simple. The grey tone-on-tone camera patterned paper made for a great background paper, and I mixed in some navy blue diagonal striped patterned paper and some black star patterned paper strips. I added the two little black enamel stars on either side of my journaling, since I had a little space on either side, and added a chipboard camera above my title.

I went back and forth on adding more to this page, and finally decided that I loved it just like it is. It's not everyday that I get to make Bella layouts that are totally for me, with no requirements or expectations. So it's nice to be able to create something that's a bit more on the simple side, but still so much my style.