Home for Christmas - Project A

Today I have a double-page layout, made from the first project in a scrapbooking workshop kit from Stampin' Up! (as always all of their images are copyright Stampin' Up!).  This one is called Home for Christmas - which will be available for purchase in early September.  The picture above is my "fix" for this page, with the original way I put it together shown below.  More about that later.

 In a YouTube video two weeks ago, I showed a current scrapbooking workshop kit and compared it with a a sneak peek at two upcoming kits which are made in Stampin' Up!s new style - what's the same and what's different.  In that video, I also cut the pieces for the above layout.  You can see that video here:

Today's video - about this layout - shows how I've added extra photos to this layout:

And here are closeups with a bit more information about what I did.

First Page: 

On this first page, you can see that my large photo is in a landscape orientation rather than portrait.  You can also see that I used 2 3x3 photos instead of just one.  I also added 3 "cookie sweaters" - pictures from our creative evening that I fussy cut (though I wish I had use them in a cluster).  I punched a hole in the tag and added a sprig of ribbon.  

When it came to embellishments, some were placed similarly to the layout Stampin' Up! provided, and some were swapped out for something else or moved to another spot.  There were two important things I was thinking about as I placed them.  First, I wanted spots of red to draw the eye around the pages.  Secondly, I wanted to hide the fact that the border didn't match up at the seam.  To hide that, I added a bow sticker and a large gingerbread cookie across both pages - then used Stampin' Up!s paper trimmer to cut the two pages apart again.   

Second Page: 

On this page, I again changed the photos.  There are only three as per the original - but they are all 3 x 4 photos rather than 3 x 3.   The other main change is that the title was moved to this page. 

I think this layout might have looked better if I had added the sweater cookies to the cluster on this page and put the title near the focal photo on the previous page.  I didn't do that, because the photos on this page don't show the cookies - just the plates we were decorating - might have been better to do that anyway.  

Later . . . 

I just didn't like the way those sweater cookies were placed.  I checked to see if I could move them.  I could!  So, I ended up moving two toward a cluster on the left page, and one toward the cluster on the right page.  This is what I ended up with:

I added the little gingerbread & candies by the upper right corner of the focal simply because there was an ink stain that I couldn't remove that had been hidden by one of the sweaters.   I think it might have been better if I could have put the title there, but that piece was not coming off without making a mess.  Regardless, I'm much happier with the layout now.