Laura Vegas

I'm finally back with something to share! I had a new two page layout up on the Bella Blvd blog yesterday. We've changed on the format on the blog a bit, and left the assignments a little looser to give our designers a bit more freedom to scrap what they're inspired to scrap. In keeping a few of the regular features going, one that I felt strongly in keeping was the two page feature. I don't think you see enough two pagers anymore, yet I do believe that there are plenty of people out there looking for two page inspiration. I could be wrong about that, but I like to think I'm on to something 😉

I love to incorporate as many photos as I can onto my layouts, and two pagers are great for just that. I almost always create two pagers for things like birthdays, holidays, family get togethers, as well as vacations and day trips. And this day trip to Great America theme park six years ago on my to-do list to get scrapped and in the album.

One of my favorite ways to work lots of photos onto my pages are by creating photo collages. As a clean and linear scrapper, it's a great way to keep the photos looking organized and clean on the page. I often pick the same template to use for both sides of the two page spread, and I simply rotate the template 180 degrees for the second collage. The nice thing about using collages is that when you sit down to start creating your layout, it's almost like you're only working with 2 large photos as you plan out the design of the spread. Once I figure out where my collages will go, I just start building the patterned papers around them.

Die cut backgrounds are a favorite of mine to use, as it helps break up the look of too much patterned paper on a page (if that's a thing?). This circle die cut background is my go-to background cut, and I use it more than I probably should. I was able to cut the background from just one sheet of the tan arrow patterned paper, as I knew I could then cut that piece in half and use one half for each side of the spread.

I needed a little something in the upper corner of the first page, so I thought I would die cut this funky sun shape. I die cut the sunbeams from black cardstock, orange Strandz patterned paper, and the white stars Clear Cut, and then layered them all together. I die cut the center of the sun from two additional patterned papers, and layered those together.

I tend to keep my layouts fairly flat, without too much bulk. Even with a full seven layers of paper where the sun is placed, my layout is still very flat.

When choosing patterned papers for my layouts, I rely on the photos to dictate the colors I go with. I had a lot of black and tan in the photos, with touches of orange and green. Those colors stood out the most to me, so those are the colors that I went looking for when starting this spread. I tend to stick with mostly tone-on-tone patterned papers, as they don't overwhelm the page as much as busier patterns can do. 

For my title, I used my favorite white text Sienna chipboard alphas, along with one of the new chip script words ("adventure"), which is also white. I'm always a sucker for a title that incorporates a cursive font, alongside a clean, solid font, so I'm really loving the new chip script words.

The last thing I do is add my embellishments. I'm a pretty simple scrapper, so I usually keep the embellishments to a minimum. Enamels and buttons are some of my go-to pieces to add to layouts, as they're fairly flat and super simple to sprinkle around the page.