Simple Stories

Well, my lurgy has finally gone and I'm feeling 100% again. Yay!

My kit from Scrap Everything! this month included these luscious Simple Stories papers. Simple Stories products are designed to make scrapbooking faster and easier for people with limited scrapping time. We all know what that's like! You can check out the range here.

I really liked the 12 x 12 page that looks like a calendar page, however I didn't want the whole layout to be the calendar. I therefore opted for a double page layout.

I had a lot of fun with this. I first went back through my pics until I found a month that had a good range of photos. I then went to my diary and looked up other things we did that I didn't take photos of. It would also work really well if you planned the month in advance and took photos accordingly as you went. You could even make these pages the basis for your whole year's scrapping and could just scrap special events on their own page if time is an issue.

Here's my layout:

 I printed all the photos in passport size then just trimmed them to squares. You could put a photo in each square but this would leave little room for journalling and I think it's important to get those details on paper. I also left a few squares blank so the page wasn't too busy. There's more than enough business on the this layout as it is!

Here's a close up:

The raw wooden KaiserCraft balloons suited the layout beautifully. You can get them here. Even though the background paper I used here is very busy, the words were all so appropriate that I had to use it! I did tone down the other side of the layout where the title is though or there would have been too much to look at!

I also added some banners. I'm a bit banner mad lately. I raised some flags higher than others to help give the appearance of movement. I also used a loop in the banner string to form the letter "o" in the title. With the exception of a small amount of AC cardstock, all the papers are from the Simple Stories range.

I realise that double page layouts are a bit hard to see online so here are the pages one at a time:

There are 10 photos on this layout and I could easily have put more on. I think this is a great way to get those day to day details documented.

I hope this inspires you to round up those unscrapped pics that are sitting on your computer and get them into an album. Most of our lives are taken up with non-monumentous occasions. It's great to scrap the birthdays, weddings and other milestones but don't forget what you did in between these events!

Ciao for now.

 Heather