The Double Layout Dilemma

Double layouts equal horror for me.  I always struggled to find a cohesiveness between two pages. I think this is difficult for me for two reasons.

First, because I'm a budget scrapbooker.  In general I struggle to spend a lot of money---on anything!  Therefore, the idea of using TWO full 12x12's of ANY paper drives me crazy!  This budget scrapbooking often leads to only having a little bit of the PERFECT paper for a double layout.  

Which leads right into the Second reason why double layout are the hardest scrapbooking for me.  Once I commit myself to a paper or an idea I have a really hard time changing my mind.  It's like when you're play Scrabble and you "find" the word "Hi" after that it's impossible to seen that 7 letter word staring right at you!  ---at least that's how it is for me. 

ANYWAYS..... In today's blog I'm going to talk about how to overcome the Double Layout Dilemma.

Here is my Camping double layout.  I have been holding onto this firework Reminisce Paper for a very long time because we always go camping over the 4th of July.  Well.... little old me didn't realize how demanding this paper would be.  It is an attention hog! Here is the way I worked through this layout...

1) Sketched the layout.  Originally this layout had the 3 4x6's on the right hand side. 1 circle photo on the right page. Plus 2 more circle photos on the left hand side.  And the title went across both pages.  

2) Choosing paper.  I choose the fireworks, of course, and the Sassafras Sunshine Broadcast paper (one of my favorites).  Since, one of my favorite things to do is mixing patterned paper I really must let the paper dictate how many photos and extra's the page can hold. 

3) Cutting Back.  I realized straight away I needed to cut the amount of pictures down.  So I got rid of the circle photos and let the firewords be the organic part of the page. 

4) Begin.  I started with the Right page because I knew it would be easier since I wanted the 3 4x6's to be stacked with means I only have half a page to deal with.  Then I started cutting. I knew I couldn't use all of the firework paper so I starting cutting out "pretty" fireworks.  Put the paper down and it worked.

5) Going with your gut. From then on I just went with my gut, looked at my product and tried to match and coordinate. :)

Another piece of beautiful, challenging Daisy Bucket paper.  I had two pieces from the Merry Wishes Holiday Lane line .  And I had some embellishments that I HAD to use because I just loved them. 

What I did was cut.  I started cutting the paper. I cut out the tree, decided to use the same design, opposing colors borders.  And just worked with the paper. 

The wonderful thing about this paper is that it's SO Christmassy!  I didn't have to do much else decoration because I like the paper and the pictures to be the star of a page! 

Then I used the embellishments the express the events of the day.