Kerri Bradford Studio: Easter Egg Hunt

Hey everyone! Hopefully you have heard by now, that Kerri Bradford Studio is back up and running!!! I know she's thrilled to have her new website fully functioning, and I'm excited to be back to creating for her blog. And today, I've got a new layout up.

When Kerri asked us to focus on spring projects this month, I knew exactly what I wanted to create. Seeing as how my girls are older, it's been years and years since we've colored eggs or had an Easter egg hunt. So I haven't had any Easter photos to scrap in years as well. But what I do have is Easter layouts from my earlier days of scrapbooking that I've been wanting to re-do.

While I have no intention of re-doing all of my earlier layouts - as I think it's cool to show the progression of my style - there are plenty of older layouts that really have no meaning or purpose to them. I pulled out an Easter layout from back in 1998, which was actually a three page layout (guess that was a thing back then ;)), and got to work on re-designing it. 

     

I figured you might want to see the original layout, and for once, I thought to take a photo of it before taking it apart. This was created almost 19 years ago, back when Creative Memories was a huge thing. I won't say they had the only scrapbooking products out there, because I'm honestly not sure if that's true. But I did start out with Creative Memories, and they were really big on only using their products. Which pretty much consisted of colored paper, a couple patterned papers (literally just a couple), a few colors of alpha stickers (literally just a few), and tiny little Mrs Grossman stickers. 

We used templates to cut our photos into shapes. We literally placed the template over the photo, traced it with a black pen, and then cut them out with a pair of scissors. They did eventually come out with a circle cutter (that I still use to this day), but I want to say the circle photos here with made with a template and a pen.

Scrapbooking has come a looooooooonnnnnngggg way since then, thank goodness!

Since my photos are from back in my film days, I had to work with what I had. Which meant lots of circle photos, some decorative cut corners, cut out corners, etc. I also had to accept the darker photos for what they were, as I couldn't just open them up in Photoshop and lighten them up, or fix the colors. 

I removed all of my photos from the previous pages, and cropped them as best I could, and worked most of them into a collage across the two page spread. I decided to keep a few of the circle photos as is, and work them into the design of the page. 

I love to use white cardstock for my backgrounds, but I also love to add some texture and interest to them, so they're not too plain. This is why I'm such a huge fan of using Kerri's background cut files. It's no secret that the circle backgrounds are my favorite, and I love to die cut them from white cardstock, to create my white-on-white backgrounds for my layouts. 

I used one of my favorite circle backgrounds, from Kerri's Background Basics kit, for this layout. I cut two full 12x12" backgrounds, since I knew I'd be using them on both pages of the spread. I trimmed off what I didn't need from one of the backgrounds, and saved it for a future layout. 

For my patterned papers, I used several papers from Paige Evan's collections by Pink Paislee. I can't actually tell you what collections they're from, as that info doesn't seem to be on the papers (unless I'm totally missing it). I also added in the green dotted patterned paper from Jillibean Soup, for part of my title as well as the scalloped border I cut using the This & That: Spring kit.

Gosh, the photos are dark! I'm trying to be ok with it, but it's hard. Lol. I feel the need to point out two things about the photos. You'll see there are rounded corners, but they're not very clean looking. Well, that's because back in 1998, when I created the original layout, we didn't have that fabulous tool called a corner rounder. Back in the day, we would simply use a pair of scissors and make rounded corners freehand. So they never looked perfect or consistent. 

I guess I could have used my corner rounder to give these better looking corners. Not sure why that didn't cross my mind. 

Also, you might notice that two photos on this spread have a weird cut out in the upper corner. There was no fixing that, unfortunately, so I had to just go with it. It was also this thing, back in the day, to cut photos into circles and/or ovals, and then make a little cut out in another photo so that you can sort of butt them up against each other. That probably made no sense. Lol.

For my title, I used a few handwritten words from Kerri's Bloom kit, along with the alphas from the Weathered Door [all] kit. I die cut each handwritten word from patterned paper, as well as black cardstock, to layer together and give some dimension. 

To embellish my pages, I fussy cut some flowers and leaves from a sheet of patterned paper to add to a few spots on the spread. To add some easy texture, I crumbled the flowers and leaves up, and then flattened them back out, before adhering them to the page. 

I know people have different views on re-doing older layouts. I, for one, love it. Like I said, I don't intend on re-doing all of my older layouts. But there's plenty that could benefit from a fresh design. It does make my older albums interesting to look through though. Those old Creative Memories albums were strap-hinge albums. And you literally created the layout on the page in the album. So it's a little trickier to just remove a page. Not like you can just pull the page out of the protector. 

Which means if you were to ever look through my older albums, you would most likely come across pages here and there where all of the photos have been torn off. And what's left is a deconstructed layout, with torn pieces of paper and left over adhesive. Kind of funny to me!

Comments

[deneen]

Love that you re-did this layout. It turned out great.

[Mandy B]

I love that you re-did a layout
they are part of our journey (old style layouts)
but fun to see who we would do in todays world!!!!

[Natalie (QSOgirl)]

This is fantastic, Laura! I'm glad that you showed a new take on an old layout. There are definitely layouts in my albums that make me cringe every time I see them (or even think about them, haha!) and I would love someday to go back and "fix" them. It's amazing to see how much scrapbook style changes over the years-- both in the industry and also as an individual.
In the past month, I have been working on an album I made 15 years ago but to which I hadn't added the journaling. Thankfully, I'd kept a detailed journal that has been invaluable for adding it now. I've been trying to maintain my style from 2002, even though it certainly isn't pretty by today's standards (and it may not have been even then! haha!). The point, though, is that the layout or album tells the STORY. The story it what makes it precious.