Laura Vegas

It's time for another "Spread It Out" feature over on the Bella Blvd blog today, which means that I have a new two page layout to share with you.

I've been a home daycare provider for a little over 14 years now, and have had close to 36 kids (the 36th was actually born yesterday and will be coming here soon!) that I've taken care of throughout those years. There are actually a few more kiddos that have been in the mix, but these are my main ones.

Lately, for different reasons, I've had a lot of these kids on my mind and I felt this need to do a layout focusing on all of the little ones that I've been lucky enough to spend my days with, and to have a small part in helping to raise them during their first few years of life.

The amount of photos I needed worked out perfectly, since I love to line things up and collage photos together. I printed them all as 2×2" photos and they fit across the page in three rows of 12 (minus the one new baby, who I will add in when he gets here).

Finding all of these photos took me forever. Which is crazy, since I did THIS FRAMED PROJECT about two years ago, and I honestly would have thought I had saved all of these photos in a folder somewhere to work from. But I hadn't. So I dug around for hours on my external hard drive, looking for photos of each of these kiddos.

I arranged the photos in sets of four, so they were directly side by side and I could treat them as one "photo" when trimming them from the sheets after printing. I just had to cut some of them in half, since I had 6 kids in each row, on each page. I should have been a little more careful when trimming them, as I left a little white border along the top and bottom, and they're not all even. But they're close enough.

Once I knew where on the pages I would add my rows of photos, that left me the areas to fill with patterned paper. Since I printed all of the photos in black and white, I had way more freedom in choosing my colors for the page. I decided on a black, white, navy blue, green, and yellow color combo, and set out to find patterned papers and other elements in those colors. And I have to point this out, only because I just noticed it. That navy blue 2×2" card says "selfie", and I totally thought it said "captured". My bad. Lol.

I pulled patterned papers from the Daily Chevies, Lucky Stars, Fresh Market, and Whatever Is Lovely collections. I actually had more that I wanted to say on this layout. My original plan was to add my title along the top, and have journaling all across the green patterned paper along the center of the pages. Once I added my title to the center of the page, that didn't leave me with as much room for journaling, so I kept it short and sweet.

I went back and forth for quite a while on my title, finally settling on "In My Heart Forever". Because honestly, every single one of these kids, no matter how much or how little I see of them after they leave me, do have a special place in my heart forever. Ok, if I'm being totally honest, there are 2-3 on here that I haven't thought of since they left. Lol. But that's another story 😉

I kept the rest of the spread pretty simple, since I wanted the focus to stay on the photos, with strips of patterned papers, a few border stickers, and some simple embellishments. I used a few 2×2" cards, either taken from a sheet of patterned paper on the Candid Cards that used to come with some of the collections. I did add a few enamels at the end. But other than those few things, I didn't feel the need to add anything else to the pages.

And that one little spot in the bottom right corner is reserved for the new baby boy, born yesterday morning. Brother to the little girl two photos over. I'll just remove that little square of patterned paper and add in his photo later.