Laura Vegas

Hey everyone! I have a new layout to share that was up on the Jillibean Soup blog a while back. I think you all know by now that I love to work with pocket pages. They're not just for Project Life albums, as they can easily be used for your every day scrapping as well. I had the idea for this layout a few months ago, and I'm so glad I finally took the time to execute my idea. 

We have this old coffee table in our family room. We've had it for well over 18 years, and it's been a well loved table. By our little family for sure. But mostly by 17 years worth of daycare kids. It's always been one of their favorite places to play, and it shows, if you were to see this table in person. It's taken one for the team, that's fur sure. It's completely beat up and covered in dents. I guess you could say it has a "distressed" look 😉

I have taken so many photos of kids playing around this table over the years, and I knew they would make a great layout. I had gone thru my external hard drive a while back and pulled out any photos that I thought would work for this layout idea, and finally took the time to sit down and figure out what I wanted to do with them. 

I love creating photo collages, so that was one option. So was printing out the photos and adhering them to my pages in a collage like fashion. But I was really itching to create a pocket page spread, and I knew all of the photos would work great as little 3×3" photos, since I take so many of my photos on my phone as squares. 

I knew that I had a 12×12" pocket page protector that had all 3×3" pockets, and that I wanted to use that for one side of my two page spread. For the other page, I came across a pocket page protector that had a large 6×12" pocket in the center and two rows of smaller 3×3" pockets – one row at the top and one row at the bottom. 

The larger 6×12" pocket across the center was the perfect spot to house my title, journaling, and a few simple embellishments. For my title, I used one of Jillibean Soup's cut files to die cut "gather" from my favorite woodgrain patterned paper. I pulled out some older red corrugated alphas to complete my title, along with a few green alpha stickers. 

I printed out my journaling and created a tag shape, matting it on a piece of green patterned paper. I added a floral puffy sticker to the bottom of the tag shape, rather than using string or ribbon. 

I decided to print all of my photos in black and white, since they had a lot of different colors going on, as they were all taken over the course of a few years. Some of the older photos had been taken with my much older cell phones, which didn't give me great quality photos. So turning them all to black and white helped make those photos look a little better. 

Working with black and white photos also allowed me to use whichever patterned papers I wanted to use, since I wasn't trying to coordinate my papers to my photos. I came across the "love my tribe" 3×4" card, taken from one of the Bite Size Bits patterned paper, and was able to trim it down into a 3×3" card to slip into a pocket on the first page of the spread. I pulled the colors for the rest of my patterned paper choices from that one card. 

I left four pockets empty on the second page of the spread, as well as one extra pocket on the first page, so that I could add in a few filler cards. I added a fun letter board saying to each pocket, which were all hand cut out of the Goodness Gracious paper from the Farmhouse Stew collection. I matted each one onto a piece of patterned paper, and added a few quick staples to the top of the letter board saying. 

I just love seeing all of these cute photos of the cute kiddos, playing and having fun around my well loved table. Individually, they're fun photos. But when you pull together a wide variety of photos like this, they can tell such an amazing story that just can't be told with a single photo. 

As beat up as this table is, we never gave any thought into replacing it. Seeing as how the kids would just take a beating to any new table we got as well. Lol.

I should also mention the "food basket", as that goes hand in hand with the table. The basket at the end of the table holds all of the play food and dishes. I have always kept that basket at the end of the table. Even going back years and years, that basket has always been there. And I'm pretty sure I have a photo of just about every kiddo I've watched sitting IN the basket. The kids always loved to sit in the basket, and there were times I'd even find two kids in the basket at once. Lol.