Laura Vegas

Hey everyone! I have a new layout up at Kerri Bradford Studio today. I came across these photos of Alyssa from Halloween 2002. I had actually started a two page layout that same year, but only had a few of the photos adhered to the pages, along with some patterned paper and one die cut frame (that gold one).

I knew I had a few additional photos in a box, along with some gold paper that I had wanted to include on the layout. I also had a vellum piece with a poem about an angel, which honestly had nothing to do with the photos. But it was something that was kind of trendy way back when. Lol. The fact that I had started this layout a full 13 years ago, and never got around to finishing it, doesn't actually surprise me. I have a lot of half-done layouts from my very early days of scrapping.

The main challenge for me, when using older photos from these half-done layouts, is that a lot of them had already been cropped to random sizes, or even into circles, ovals, or other shapes (that was a big trend way back then too). And since these photos are from my film days, it's not like I can just pull them up in Photoshop, edit them, and print them the specific sizes that I want.

I do have all of my negatives, and they're very organized so that I could get reprints made if needed. But I find that even reprints from old negatives don't always turn out that well these days. Scanning the photos is always an option too, but once again, I just don't get great results with that either. So I do the best I can with the photos I have, which is exactly what I did on this layout.

I rarely use standard Halloween colors when scrapping my Halloween photos. I let my photos, and the colors of the costumes, decide the colors I'll use. For these photos of my daughter, in an adorable angel costume, I went with gold, brown, and a shade of yellow that paired nicely with both the gold and brown. It just so happen that all of the patterned papers I picked out for this layout were from My Mind's Eye.

One of the first things I had pulled out for this layout was the gold Confetti Clear Cut transparencies from Bella Blvd. I don't own a lot of gold product, but this was one thing that I knew I had on hand. I added a large piece to the bottom of each page of the spread.

I used glue dots along the top and bottom of the transparency, knowing that I would be adding a strip of patterned paper along the edges (that would cover up those glue dots). Somewhere in creating this spread, I must have decided NOT to add the patterned paper strip along the bottoms of the pages. And I didn't even think about it until I was editing the photos, but you can see the glue dots, since I didn't cover them. You might not have noticed, but I love to point out the "mistakes" I make 😉

I was able to create my title to include the word "angel", as Kerri had that word in her Oh Baby kit. I paired it up with a handwritten "Halloween" word from the October Thirty-One kit.

I kept the gold die cut frame that was already adhered to one of my photos, since like I mentioned, I don't have a lot of gold products. And that gold paper that I had laying around in a box, with the photos, and have no clue where it's from or who made it? I used that for part of my title, and to die cut the stars. 

I embellished the page with some simple stars from Kerri's Thank My Lucky Stars kit, and added gold glittered and brown enamel dots added to the centers. And at the last minute, I decided that I needed a little something to the right of the photo up there on the second page. I didn't want to have to think too hard about it, and the first thing that popped into my head were these little tags from Creative Imaginations, from their Creative Café collection of embellishments. A really old product, but one that I can never seem to get rid of.