Laura Vegas

This week has been pure madness around here. I have one of my previous daycare girlies here visiting this week and next, making it a lot more hectic around here. The youngest in the group just turned 1 years old last week, which means I officially have four 1 year olds in the house, in addition to the older ones. The last 2+ months of summer break is wearing on me, and I think I'm ready for a break from everyone at this point.

And my girls go back to school tomorrow, which means the last week has been a blur of activities just leading up to the first day of school. Link Crew meetings for Alyssa (leadership), freshman orientation for Sarah, Round-Up days for both the girls (where they get their schedules, turn in forms, have school pictures taken, pay for all the stuff that needs paying for, etc. And they've both had three days of band camp, along with fall soccer starting back up last week. It's a lot of running them back and forth, and I appreciate having Grammie, Papa, Aunt Kathy, and a few other mom's there to help out with that part of it.

{Photos courtesy of Krista Lund, friend and photographer}

Anyways. I thought I would take a minute while the kids are napping and share a quick layout. This is another one of my CHA layouts for Bella Blvd, using the new Daily Chevies & Everyday Bits collection. This collection has five fabulous tone-on-tone large chevron patterned papers, along with a black and white large chevron pattern as well. I got the bright idea to fussy cut a few chevron rows from each of the five tone-on-tone papers, and then piece them back together to make a colorful chevron pattern.

It did take a while to cut all of those chevron rows out. After I had quite a few cut out, I started arranging them on a sheet of white cardstock. I used some of the lighter colored rows and some of the darker colored rows, and spaced them so there was a small gap in between each row. Once I was happy with the combo, I adhered them all down, covering the entire sheet of cardstock.

I think I had a bit different idea in my head when I started this, and thought more of the sheet would show. After deciding to only use the pieced together chevron pattern on the sides of the page, I simply used my trimmer to cut off a 2" wide section off each side of the sheet. This left me with an 8×12" piece of this pieced together sheet that I can use for another project.

I wanted to add a touch of patterned paper along the sides as well, so I pulled out a pink flower paper from the Play Date collection and the aqua dotted paper from the Christmas Countdown collection. The white grid paper is from the Trick or Treat collection.

I finished it off with a chipboard border and alphas for the title, a few feathers (both are white, even though one looks a bit cream from the yellow paper behind it), a crochet heart, a few buttons and some stickers.

I thought I would pop back in here tonight with another Bella Blvd CHA layout share. This is one of four layouts I created  using the new Daily Chevies & Everyday Bits collection.

{Photos courtesy of Krista Lund, friend and photographer}

I borrowed these adorable photos that my friend Krista took of her three kids. I knew the bright colors would work great with this collection. The large tone-on-tone chevron patterns make for great background papers. I decided to use pink on one side of the page (for the girls), and orange on the other side of the page (for the boy).

And in between the pink and orange chevron papers, I used a long strip of the colorful heart patterned paper. The black star paper is on the backside of the green chevron paper. I cut a single row of the star paper to add on either side of the heart paper. I love how the black really "pops" next to all the other bright colors.

I did pull a small bit of the aqua cloud patterned paper from the Play Date collection, to add the scalloped borders along the top and bottom of the photos.

I also added a few feathers to the page, tucking a pink feather on the pink chevron paper, and an orange feather on the orange chevron paper. I added a few chipboard clouds, running the aqua cloud thru a dotted embossing folder. To add some interest to the heart patterned paper, I added coordinating theaded buttons to some of the hearts.

The new collections begin shipping a week from today, so they'll be hitting stores really soon. Keep checking in on the Bella Blvd blog as well, as we're sharing more CHA projects all this week and next week.

Opps. I got behind in my blogging. I was doing so well last week. This week, and for the next two weeks, we are sharing each and every booth project for CHA Summer over on the Bella Blvd blog. I've had quite a few go up this week, so I'll be sharing my remaining projects here and there over the next week or two.

{Photos courtesy of Krista Lund, friend and photographer}

This was one of the last layouts I created for my CHA work, and honestly, it took me the longest to get going. Not sure why. It's such an adorable photo of my friend Krista's oldest daughter. And I had the super fun Snapshots collection to work with. Sometimes there's just too much good product to choose from, that you're not sure where to start.

After much thinking, re-arranging, shuffling, I finally got an idea started. I trimmed down the ruled patterned paper to about 11×11, and matted it on the floral patterned paper. I then added long strips of the aqua diagonal stripe designer tape along all four sides, and machine stitched along the edges.

I knew I wanted to use the "random thoughts" journaling card, to pick up the blue in Kaitlyn's outfit. And since there are so many fun patterned papers in the collection, I decided to use quite a few of them i small amounts. I cut small pieces from several papers and layered the papers behind the photo to create a frame.

The "love you more" heart is from the Paper Pieces die cut pack. I adhered it with pop dots, tucking a feather behind it and adding a white crochet heart to the heart.

I added a few border pieces, stickers, and some threaded buttons sprinkled on here and there to finish it off.

Make sure and stop by the Bella Blvd blog to find a ton of project inspiration from our CHA designers using the new collections. 

Today we are revealing our forth new collection on the Bella Blvd blog. Daily Chevies & Everyday Bits is a super colorful collection. There are the large chevon patterns, which we have also seen in other colors spinkled into other collections over the last year, in 6 new colors. I love the monocramatic look of the chevron design, and was excited to see Stephanie mix in a few colors that I suggested.

{Photos courtesy of Krista Lund, friend and photographer}

I used quite a bit of color blocking on my layouts this time around. Love the look and it fits my style. I printed out this cute photo of my friend Krista and her family as a 6×6" photo, and built around it with the papers.

I also kept with the monocramatic look with my embellishments. Using some white/grey buttons on the white/grey diamond paper, and yellow heart buttons on the yellow heart paper.

The chipboard "Family" letters are from an older Ciao Chip Elements set, but the colors matched perfectly with the striped paper. I love that so many of the colors throughout the Bella collections coordinate together, even with the older products.

I thought the "Welcome To My Life" pie chart card was a fun one, and would tie in nicely with the photo. I added a chipboard heart piece to the center of the pie chart, to get a bit more pink on the layout. Then I used the tiny alpha stickers from the High Five alphabet sticker sheets to journal on the right side. I coordinated the sticker colors with the color they represented on the pie chart. I did have to dig into some yellow letter stickers from another manufacturer, since Bella doesn't have the tiny alphas in yellow.

I lined up my four pieces of chevron paper along the bottom, so that it keeps the perfect chevron design all the way across and the chevrons line up. I then added a coordinating crochet heart to the center of each piece.

Today we are revealing the third of our five new collections on the Bella Blvd blog. During the summer shows, you tend to see quite a few fall and winter holiday collections popping up, and Bella is right there with a few new ones to share.

{Photos courtesy of Krista Lund, friend and photographer}

This is one of two layouts I created with the Trick or Treat collection. With my girls being older, they don't really do Halloween anymore, and I don't have many photos to pull from years of past, that I haven't already scrapped 7 times before. I knew I could count on my friend Krista to have some cute Halloween photos of her kids, because she alwasys sets up the most adorable backdrops to take holiday photos of her little ones.

I think many of you know that I love using Bella's white grid paper on my layouts for a great neutral background paper. The Trick or Treat collection has a new grid patterned included, in case you have a hard time finding the older one. I used a little grey misting spray on the grid paper, and then matted it to the  black spider web paper.

I used quite a few of the die cut Paper Pieces on this layout. The little label up there is a die cut. I added a little machine stitching to it, and used some tiny alpha stickers to write "Emily".

The polaroid frame is one of my favorites in the Paper Pieces package. The colored arrow is a die cut piece as well, and that black grid arrow is from a new sticker sheet that we'll be revealing tomorrow.

I do love the Borders paper, and I used 4 of those border strips on the bottom of the page, adding machine stitching between all of them.