Scrapbook & Cards Today: Then & Now

Hey everyone! I had a new layout go up on the Scrapbook & Cards Today blog earlier this week. A few weeks back my sister came out from Denver for a surprise visit home. She doesn’t make it home that often, so whenever she does come out, we try and make a point to take new family photos. And this time, we were smart enough to get a few photos of just our little family. It seems like the only time we get a photo of the four of us together is at Christmas.

The last time we had a nice family photo taken (not including Christmas!) was back in 2009. That’s six years, which is a little crazy. I thought it would be fun to include photos from the two separate years, 2009 and 2015, onto one layout. Showing us then, and now.

  

Our photos were pretty similar in look and colors. This really helped when making my paper choices. If the colors had been totally different, I would have most likely printed my photos in black and white. I printed a family photo and a photo of just the girls from each year, all 3”x 4” in size. I knew that my plan was to split the page in half, so putting the two photos for each year together would make them 6” across (half the page).

This layout is pretty much made up of paper, paper, and more paper! I dug into some new Amy Tangerine patterned papers, from her Finder's Keepers collection (one might be from another collection come to think of it), that I had just bought, and found a few patterns that I thought went great with my photos. By cutting small strips of each pattern, and also using one for my die cut title, I was able to work 5 different patterned papers onto the page.

For my title, "Then & Now" (but without the & because I just forgot), I used the Weathered Door Alpha kit from Kerri Bradford Studio. I cut the main letters from the blue dotted patterned paper and the outline of the letters from a dark brown cardstock.

I had already put my Silhouette Cameo away (it resides on the floor when I'm not using it) when I decided that I wanted to include a few die cut strips to mix up all of the solid blocks of patterned paper. I remembered a Die-namics die cut I had from My Favorite Things, and the 6" circle border die was perfect for what I needed. 

For my journaling, I typed up just a few facts about our family for each year. I could have said so much more, but I wanted to keep it fairly short and sweet to fit the space I had to work with. Journaling is almost always the last thing I add to my layouts, so whatever space is left usually dictates how much I can say ;)

Comments

[Diana]

I'm loving the pictures! What a fun way to incorporate two different years--LOVE it!

[Dolly]

Just love your LOs Laura! :D

[Mendi Yoshikawa]

This turned out amazing! Love the colors you went with and how you just happened to be wearing the same colors all those years apart--or maybe that was planned. ;) Such a fun, split design with the colorblocking too! :)