Another updated treatment of some older photos I'd already scrapped. I wanted to really focus on the interaction between my son and my dad. I seldom journal with just quotes, but for this layout, the pictures and the quote, "There is no grandfather who does not adore his grandson" (Victor Hugo) say it all and my words would be redundant.

I did something different to choose what papers to use on this: I was getting tired of "baby" stuff and couldn't decide what to use. I have seven Cropper Hopper vertical files of patterned paper, but two of them count as one because they hold my miscellaneous patterned papers in color order. So I took a dice and rolled it and took my paper from the file it indicated. I got a 6, so I looked in my end file and found this cool brown-and-teal paper in a set of KI Memories travel paper. Never would have thought to look there otherwise. It works great here - masculine but soft. I also got to use a bunch of eyelets in one of my favorite ways, to make a border along the photo mat. This is why I've reserved the right to buy a Crop-a-Dile Big Bite when I've got the cash on hand; my regular CaD worked great for the eyelets close to the edge of the page, but pounding in those other ones with my hammer was a pain.

Patterned papers, circle stickers: KI Memories; quote: JoAnn Scrap Essentials; computer font: CK Typist; eyelets: Making Memories. 

Another photo that originally appeared as a very tiny cropped image on a page with a random selection of a bunch of other photos.

I rarely do one-photo layouts, but this picture of Aaron in this little Noah's Ark outfit is so cute it deserved its own page. (Plus I only have one picture of him in this outfit.) And it was a great chance to use this adorable baby paper from Autumn Leaves. I put the little cutout squares with outfits on them in places where the sketch called for small photos, and it worked great. I also got inspired by the text designs on the paper and used a piece of ephemera for the letters. Several years back, when the vintage-collage look was all the rage, I bought way too many packages of reproduction ephemera, even though I don't have a drop of collage talent. So yay, I actually used a whole piece of it!

Supplies: Patterned paper: Autumn Leaves; letter template, Provo Craft; ephemera: Me and My Big Ideas; ribbon: Making Memories; journaling stamp: Autumn Leaves 

More cute pictures of Aaron when he was a baby. (And of his brother, who usually managed to get in on the photography sessions.) Amazingly, only one of these photos made it onto my original scrapbook pages. No wonder that looking at the old pages made me feel like we hardly had any pictures of Aaron. And it was one of the ones with Jesse in it, which made me feel like we had even fewer pictures of just Aaron. No offense to Jesse, but I wished I had more pictures of Aaron alone. Crummy scan, cute layout. I probably forgot to tell the scanner not to "enhance" the color when I was scanning one of the halves.

Patterned paper: Provo Craft; letter stickers: KI Memories; journaling boxes: DB Journal Aids and DB Journal Doodles, Scrappin Fonts (normally I hate paying for fonts and dingbats, but these were totally worth it). 

Now that you've seen the old version of this page, here's the new one:

Four pictures instead of six, chosen to really focus on Jesse's relationship with his baby brother, and cropped from 4 x 6 photos so it's easier to see their faces. The title strip, part of the collection I used, just says it all.

Patterned papers, title strip, journaling square, and robot cutouts (from patterned paper): Cosmo Cricket Cogsmo collection (which is just so cute and perfect for my boys I can hardly stand it); chipboard letters, Colorbok. 

Ok, before we go any further, I'm going to post an example of what I mean when I say I want to re-do a bunch of these old pictures of Aaron. I originally scrapbooked his baby photos when I was first starting out, and while I have no intention of getting rid of the old layouts (they're part of my own history), they are definitely lacking in some areas. First of all, I didn't scrapbook all the pictures we took, mainly because I didn't have extra prints of all of them and even back then I knew better than to crop an original print. Getting reprints was a pain back in the days of using negatives. Also, I guess some of them I didn't think were good enough, while now with digital photo editing photos can be zoomed, enlarged, cropped and spiffed up into acceptibility or even better. Another problem is that I would take these little 3x5 inch prints and crop them within an inch of their lives, often in weird shapes, rendering them even tinier. Then I would combine a lot of them on a page with some lame and random theme and some unenlightening captions. Here's what I mean:

Now, this is a particularly egregious example. But you get the idea. I really felt like I wanted to focus more closely on the relatively few photos we took of Aaron (at least as compared to Jesse when he was a baby) and give them more attentive and appropriate treatment. Not to replace these old layouts, but to supplement them, fill in the missing pieces and tell the story more completely (and with a little more style).

Patterned paper: you don't seriously want to know, do you? Anyway, it's either Paper Pizzazz by Hot Off the Press, or from the old Memories in the Making kits I used to get, which haven't been available in years. 

Another layout with pictures of Aaron as a baby, meant to supplement the old layouts I did back when I first started scrapbooking.

The old versions of these photos were tiny. I wanted to really zoom in on how cute my son was sleeping all bent over in his carrier seat. I thought about using hearts for accents like the ones on the seat, but that would have been too obvious and repetetive, I decided. Stars suggest nighttime and sleeping (though these pictures are of daytime naps), plus he was my little star!

Patterned papers: Provo Craft (yellow, green, blue dot), Paper Fever (blue rectangles); title font: Curlz MT; chipboard star: Basic Grey (?). 

Ok, time to do some catching up. I've already finished layout #13, so I'm kind of behind in posting.

Just a family gathering at our house on Christmas night, 1990. I have a real mental block about doing Christmas pages, but since there wasn't much that was overtly Christmassy in these photos, I just went with vaguely holiday-like antique colors and patterns and didn't feel boxed in by a Christmas theme. The empty space in the upper left-hand quadrant kind of bothered me, then I decided what's the point in having beautiful bold-patterned background paper if you cover it all up? So I decided to leave it alone, it has a sort of leaf-and-berries motif that seems vaguely Christmassy so it fits with the theme, and stuck a chipboard flourish up in the corner just to hold the layout together. Works for me.

Patterned paper, journaling label: K&Company; chipboard flourish:  Rusty Pickle.

OK, first of all, I've decided that un-du is also an allowable purchase on my challenge. (Been having a really hard time with a layout the last few days. )

Also, just wanted to note that most of my layouts are based on sketches or otherwise scraplifted. I just don't have the ability to visualize how things are going to turn out unless I have an example in front of me. Right now I've been making heavy use of the BHG Scrapbooks Etc. Page Planner and Page|Maps by Becky Fleck, as well as other sketches, ideas from magazines, and so on. If I out-and-out scraplift someone else's layout (as in copying the elements and layout more or less exactly) I'll credit the source; however, I rarely do this, only when I'm really really stuck. Otherwise, I combine and re-combine and rework so many elements from so many different sources that there's really no point in trying to list all the sources. It's like when you post a recipe you made up, trying to list everything you've ever eaten that contributed to coming up with the new idea. And sketches, by definition, are intended to be copied in layouts, so I don't really feel obligated to credit them when I use them.

So, with business taken care of, here's layout #2.

More pictures from when Aaron was born. Two of them I hadn't scrapped before, and the third appeared in a much smaller version. I wanted to focus on the "little brother" aspect of my older son meeting his little brother for the first time. Serendipitously, the text-patterned paper I wanted to use had the words "little brother" printed right in the area that would fall in the title placement area of the sketch, so this page came together really easily. I love it when that happens.

Patterned paper and die cuts: KI Memories; chipboard brackets: Colorbok?; journaling stamp: Autumn Leaves.

First off, I realized I forgot to write out the terms of the challenge. The only stuff I can buy is adhesives (duh, can't scrapbook without them), replacement blades for my various cutting implements, cardstock in bulk quantities (no running to the store to find THE PERFECT shade of cardstock for what I'm working on), and albums and page protectors, once I get to the point where I'm stacking my layouts in one of my (many) KI Memories Value Set collectible tins. I also reserve the right to buy a Cropodile Big Bite, when I have some spare cash and a coupon. I have the regular Cropodile and realized I would use a lot more of my eyelets if I had the Big Bite. And goodness knows I have plenty that need to be used. Oh, and if my distress ink pads dry out or get used up, I can replace those.

 Okay, layout #1 (the first one after I put away all the new stuff I bought, slapped myself on the hand, and issued this new challenge to myself):

I scrapbooked Aaron's infancy when I first started scrapbooking, and didn't do a very thorough job.  Looking through that album, it looks like we took very few pictures of Aaron when he was a baby. In reality, while we didn't take as many of him as we did of Jesse (second-child syndrome, I guess), I also didn't scrap very many of the ones we had and I tended to mash a whole bunch of them together on one page. Plus I didn't have a lot of extra prints, and this was back in the days of film, where if you wanted reprints you had to get out the negatives, squint at each strip to find the ones you wanted, mark them down on the form, put them in the envelope, take them to the photo shop (because the reprints from Walgreens always came out green), wait 4 or 5 days, and pay 35 cents per 3 1/2 X 5 print. Pleh. Now that I've got these old photos scanned, it's a snap to order nice big 4 X 6 prints online and pick them up at Target an hour later. So that's what I'm doing with Aaron's babyhood pictures - getting new prints and making new layouts (not to replace the original layouts, but to supplement them) that showcase the pictures better, and display pictures that never made it onto layouts originally. Like this one of my father-in-law holding Aaron for the first time. It's too precious to not scrapbook. And the one of both of them holding Aaron was tiny to start with and cropped within an inch of its life on the original layout.

Supplies: Patterned paper, journaling label, and file tab: SEI; flourish: traced from a Me and My Big Ideas chipboard swirl.