Thanksgiving

As much as I try, I don’t tend to take a lot of pictures on Thanksgiving. Maybe it’s because I spend time in the kitchen cooking and cleaning and the rest of my day eating! I try to get the obligatory photos of sitting down at the table and some of the cooking - especially if Jim is the chef.

But the pictures I do take, I want to scrapbook and preserve in a layout. In my last blog post I talked about the Gratitude page tradition and that is my most sentimental layout of this season, but I do want to show the family, friends and loved ones that sat around the table to share in the feast.

Scrapbooking Tips

I had only four photos to work with for this layout. I had absolutely no wiggle room to crop my 6x4” (horizontal) photos because otherwise I would be cropping out a family member. I was able to crop my 4x6” (vertical) photos down to 4x4”. I lined my 4 photos up across the center of a double page layout. However, this photo arrangement left unequal margins around the page and I was at a loss of what to do. That’s when I started flipping through my thanksgiving/fall papers for some inspiration.

In one of my 6x6” paper pads I saw a sheet made up of 2x2” blocks and that’s how I came up with this design. I cut apart the squares and some pattern paper and created a border around my photos. Some of the 2x2” squares had words or designs and I scattered around the layout in a somewhat even but random arrangement.

I then cut the designs out of other pattern paper blocks, such as the pumpkin pie and bunch of pumpkins. I adhered those on top of a pattern paper square with foam adhesive.

The words you see adhered to the photos also came from a 6x6 sheet of pattern paper. Using my paper trimmer I carefully cut them down and placed them directly on my photos.

I added a simple title with Thickers, which are dimensional letter stickers. I picked a neutral brown with printed stitching on them. I absolutely love the versatility of letter stickers with a simple border! It really helps them stand out against darker colors as you see here.

When I finished adhering everything down, I still felt the layout looked incomplete. I added a simple stitched border along the top and bottom and it help finish it off. If I did not add the stitched border, this layout would have come together in 10 minutes it was that simple.

Overall, I think this is one of my simpler layouts as far as construction, but it looks a little busy because of the papers. I pushed myself outside of my comfort zone and although I like this layout, I would do two things differently. First, I would have swapped out the dark brown patterned paper square that was underneath my title. I had already adhered it when it was time to do the title and I didn’t want to mess with it. Secondly, I would have stitched some type of design border, such as scallops, other than a simple straight line. But with these slight adjustments, I would use this design again.

Supplies Used:

Cardstock: Bazzill

Pattern paper: Carta Bella

Letter stickers: American Crafts

Miscellaneous: DMC Embroidery floss