Laura Vegas

It's the first Monday of the month, which means our free step-by-step monthly project sheet for October is available on the Bella Blvd blog (I also have the direct link at the end of this post). This month, I was asked to create a fall themed layout, using our orange Clear Cuts and squares in the design.

The majority of the time, I'm told a specific collection to use for every project sheet. This was the first time in ages that I wasn't given a specific collection, most likely because we didn't have a new fall collection this year. So the first thing I did was to find patterned papers from our newest collections that were fall colored, knowing I would also be using our orange Confetti Clear Cut transparency.

I pulled the green striped and red dotted patterned papers from the Family Frenzy collection. The navy blue diagonal striped patterned paper is from the Color Chaos collection. And the brown woodgrain is from last year's Hello Autumn collection.

My next challenge was to find some fall themed photos. I've always said that we don't really have a "fall" season here, like most people do. We have touches of it, sure. But it's not like I have a huge selection of photos that scream "fall". And I've pretty much scrapped all of our pumpkin patch photos from when the girls were younger. I did consider re-scrapping some, but I knew my plan involved square photos, and most of the photos I had just wouldn't work as squares.

So I went straight to someone that I knew would have some amazing photos. Designer and photographer Megan Klauer, who was also one of my Bella designers for a few years. I found these adorable photos of her kiddos from an apple picking adventure and knew they'd be perfect.

Knowing I had to incorporate squares into my page design, my immediate idea was to arrange 3×3" photos and patterned paper squares around the outside edges of the page. I also mixed in some 3×3" squares of the orange dotted Clear Cut. I used white cardstock as the base of my page, and just adhered everything onto that, letting the white show thru on the transparency.

That left me with a 6×6" spot in the middle of the page, where I could add a larger square of patterned paper to hold my title and journaling. For all of my squares of patterned paper, I distressed the edges and machine stitched around them before adhering to the page.

I used the same title idea as seen on THIS LAYOUT. Now that I looked at that layout again, after going to grab the link for it, I realized this title is pretty much exactly the same. Lol. Wasn't planned that way. I cut the orange scalloped border sticker into two smaller pieces, so that I could arrange my sticker and chipboard title letters on two "lines". And yes, technically I should add an apostrophe to "pickin", but I just didn't think about it at the time.

It was a little tricky to find embellishments for this page. I do stick to a budget of sorts for these project sheets, so I can't go using stickers from 5 different sheets to get what I need. I pulled stickers from the Family Frenzy Treasures & Text sticker sheet that would work for this fall themed layout, and would coordinate color wise.

I then added a few orange crochet hearts and some aqua enamel dots to tie in with the aqua corner stickers I used on my title piece.

You can download a copy of the October project sheet, complete with a fully supply list and detailed instructions, RIGHT HERE.