Scrapbooking to the 50’s

What do you do when you never get to scrapbook, you finally decide you are going to start and complete a layout, you pick the pictures and then realize that you don’t have a clue what paper you can use to create the layout?  You panic, set the pictures aside and say I guess I won’t be scrapbooking these this time.  Actually, I hope that’s not what you do. The correct answer is... get creative.

About this time last year, my two oldest children attended their homeschool formal - you know it’s time to scrapbook the event when the next one is almost here. It was such a fun theme and I couldn’t wait to scrapbook the pictures accept life kept coming and my scrapbook time seemed to get shorter and shorter. Two weeks ago I finally decided it was time. Time to take some time for me. Time to have some fun and scrapbook. Time to tackle over 100 pictures and try to keep those pictures to one to two double page layouts. Scrapbookers are infamous for taking way more pictures then we will ever be able to use but we don’t want to miss a thing (I’m proud to be a scrapbooker 😁).

The theme of the formal was Shake, Rattle and Roll. Lots of 50’s themed items were brought in, including a couple cars and trucks. I admit I spent quite a bit of time looking through my stash of papers looking for 50’s themed paper but came up empty. Then I changed my mindset and thought if I could find just one piece of patterned paper that looked like it was from that era then I could supplement the rest with card stock.  I was excited to find one piece of argyle paper with colors that would work from our Cruisin’ My Reflections paper pack from 2012! See, this is why it is so important that we have a stash of paper to go through for our layouts. You have my permission to tell your husbands I said so.  Please feel free to give him access to my website so he can buy you more paper but make sure you don’t give him my phone number to call and complain about the size of your stash😃.

I had to be creative with my embellishments, cardstock, cricut but ended up pleased with my final layout. So after all that yappin’, let me show you what I came up with.

On the left page, you can see where I added a Pocket Plus page  in order to add more photos to the layout. I would normally tell you to separate pictures with a journaling card or embellishment piece in the Pocket Plus page but I had too little paper and too many pictures to follow the “rules”.

Here’s the layout with the Pocket plus page turned over and a white frame overlay added to my middle picture. Again, just another way to break up the constant look of pictures and add interest and definition.

Here I add a piece of paper from our retired Basics Paper Fundamental pack.  To add in more pink to the layout and match my daughter's dress, I highlighted the words "love life" with the Watercolor Paints and this years color of the year color - Bashful. The cardstock colors and Crusin' papers are a little dark so to lighten them up and help draw out my daughter in the photos I added small accents of bashful throughout the layout.

If you look closely below the watercolored words you can see where I took some old, retired page protectors from our 4x4 mini albums and created a small mini album of sorts on my layout. If I had our 4x4 flip flaps in arms reach I would have used them instead but this was a great way for me to use up some of my retired items so I just went with it.

 I used some of our large, retired brads to hold all the pages together. By doing this I was able to add even more pictures without overwhelming the whole layout.

Other then cardstock everything, including my stamps were from my scraps or retired items. I love that I was able to put this layout together with items I already had (which incidentally helps me make room for more, new supplies- yay!)

I hope you are able to craft this week and remember to get creative, not frustrated!

Happy Scrappin'!