Laura Vegas

Hey everyone! I've been doing way less scrapbooking these days, so my blogging has suffered. But I do have a new layout up at Kerri Bradford Studio today. With the official start of summer right around the corner, I was itching to create a fun summer layout. So that's what I did.

I dug up some really old photos (taken back in 2007) of a family get together at my brother and sister-in-law's house. Our summer's usually consist of temperatures in the 100's, so most of our gatherings revolve around a swimming pool, to keep everyone cool. To be honest, I have scrapped these photos before. But this layout will definitely take the place of the other layout, since it's way more "me" than the previous one.

Since I had a lot of photos I wanted to include, I pulled up a template from Kerri's Storyboard #3 kit that I felt would work well with my photos. I used this same template twice, once for either side of my two page spread. I just flipped the template for the second page so that it would mirror the template on the first page.

I also printed a few main photos individually to add to the top section of the two pages. I still had a few additional photos that I would have loved to include, but getting 20 photos onto this layout pretty much told the story of the day. I even stuck the one photo of myself on there, even though I hate it.

I knew the top part of my pages would be white cardstock, but I wanted to add something so that it wasn't so plain looking. I decided to use the sun from the This & That: Summertime [just shapes] kit, and cut three different sizes of suns, multiple times.

I layered the suns on the top half of each page, adding adhesive only to the centers of the suns. This added some easy dimension and texture to the page, as they weren't adhered totally flat. I then misted over the top half of each page, using pink, green, and aqua misting sprays.

All of my patterned papers on this spread are from My Mind's Eye. I came across the floral patterned paper, and thought it would work well, so I went searching for a few tone-on-tone papers in pink and aqua to match. I honestly believed that the papers matched well when I started this layout. I was matching that pinkish paper to the small amount of pink you can see in the floral paper (and also matching it to the girls swimsuits). In the end, I think my colors were a little off, but it still works.

For my title, I choose the words "hello" and "pool" from Kerri's Summer Lovin' kit. I knew I wanted a large title along the top of the page, so I sized each word fairly large. I cut each word from patterned paper, as well as black cardstock, and layered them together.

I had every intention of adding a subtitle, "you know we love you", and then completely forgot about it until I was editing the photos of the layout. Opps. At least I worked that thought into my journaling 😉

When it comes to buttons, I always thread them. But very rarely do I take the time to hand stitch them to the page anymore. I usually thread them, and then add a glue dot to the back and stick in place. But since I was using clear buttons on a white background, I decided to take the extra time to hand stitch them all in place. Really not that time consuming, but it did take me longer than glue dotting them.

Speaking of 100 degree days of summer, we had one of those earlier this week. And we were all miserable. The air conditioning can't keep up when it gets that hot, so it's just constantly turning on and off, on and off, over and over. At one point, I realized it was 82 degrees in the house, when I had it set at 78. So I turned off the air and gave it a break, knowing it was 102+ degrees outside.

I left to go get a haircut after all the daycare kids left, and when I got home a few hours later, the family informed me that they were dying and it was 87 degrees in the house. No one had even thought to turn the AC back on and cool things back down. Lol. We're looking at 100 degree temps again this weekend, so wish us luck and hope we survive!