Craft The Story: Ali Edwards - Drive

I'm pretty sure I promised to be back to share another pocket page with you this week, but I decided to share a layout instead. I'll save that pocket page I mentioned for next week ;) The layout I'm sharing today features some products from the "Drive" Story Kits from Ali Edwards. 

This wasn't one of the themes that stood out to me right away, as I was picking out a few kits to play with. But somewhere along the way, I thought of the idea of documenting teaching my girls to drive. I love that theme of each kit can be used in so many ways. I did a layout not too long ago about Sarah getting her driving license (seen HERE), but I thought it would be fun to do a page about both of the girls together. 

The first thing I did was dig up any photos I had taken of the girls in the car, while they were learning to drive. It was something that I would do occasionally when taking them out. Snap a photo of them, almost always at a stop light or parked (or even waiting on a train). I used a template from Kerri Bradford to collage these photos together and print them out. 

I had picked out a few of the 3x4" cards from the Story Kit that I knew I wanted to incorporate into the page design, and also a few circle embellishments. I used those as the starting points to picking out my patterned papers, looking for coordinating shades of green, aqua, brown, and yellow. This actually ended up being very easy to do, and only took me a few minutes. That never happens, but it did! 

I found a sheet of brown cardstock from Die Cuts With A View that matched that "you got this" card perfectly. And then added in some patterned papers from Amy Tan and Fancy Pants.

I also knew that I wanted to use the acrylic "drive" word that came in the kit. I just love the acrylic words from these kits, and they're one of the main things that drew me to the kits to begin with. I paired it up with some brown alpha stickers from Jillibean Soup to complete my title. 

Since the top of my layout was going to be just the white cardstock, I used one of my favorite cut files from Kerri Bradford to die cut a circle background, also from white cardstock, to layer up there for a little texture and interest. I used a few of these transparent circle embellishments from the kit, and simply stapled them in place using my Tiny Attatcher. 

I often save my journaling for the end of my page design, but if I know I'm going to print out a large amount of journaling, or a longer block of journaling (like here), I will do it before I start the layout so that I make sure I have enough room for it.

I wish my printers made it easier to print journaling that is 12" long (well, 11.5" if you consider the margins). I don't have a wide format printer, so I just trim my cardstock to 8.5x12" to print on. I know for a fact that my journaling lines were 11.5" long, yet they printed much shorter than that. And there was also more room on the right side than on the left. That stuff bugs me, but not enough for me to keep trying to get it to work right. 

I also included one photo of myself in the car. I had more photos of the girls, but they didn't quite match the other photos. In digging around for photos, I had also pulled out a bunch of myself I had taken, while running errands, driving kids around, etc, since I had another layout idea in mind at the same time. So I ended up pulling one of those photos and using it on this collage. I thought the little sidenote there was kind of funny! 

Comments

[Cheryl]

Love this.

As to your uneven margins, if you are printing vertically on a piece of 8.5 x 12 inch paper and using an inkjet printer, the issue is that most inkjets need more room at the bottom of the page to hold onto the paper, so you just need to make your top margin the same size as the required bottom margin.

That said, I didn't notice the uneven margins until you pointed it out, and even then it's barely noticeable.

[Tracey]

Love this Laura!! Awesome page! Love the Story Kits. Might have to subscribe to them again some time!