Sometimes it’s so much easier to make a layout of just 1-3 close up photos. Those profile photos can be enlarged to fill in the space so you can complete the layout faster.  But sometimes you might want to include those extra photo’s you took where ever you might have been, because they too are important in telling the story!

I am a sucker for historical photo’s. The before’s and afters. I like to take my own photo’s of places and landmarks around me so Dyllan can see the changes in the place that he lives.  Here we are at Tanaka Farms in Irvine, CA. It’s a family owned farm which offers tours during Strawberry, watermelon and Pumpkin season.  (Above) – as you can see,  we did Strawberry Picking. You ride a huge wagon pulled by a tractor through their field. A gal on board tells you what you are seeing, how it’s grown and stops at certain points so  the workers can pull the likes of onion, lettuce, broccoli and parsnips fresh from the ground for everyone  to sample. When we get to the Strawberry’s, they give each person a plastic container and let us pick our fill. Once the containers are full we have another 15 minutes to “eat” our fill!  On the wagon ride back all the kids had red juice running down their chins, making them look like little vampires!

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For my paper, I did not have enough of one color to make the 2 page spread, so I sorted through my paper scraps  and found a assortment to work with!  I distressed all the edges with brown ink then applied them to the spread.  I chose blue to be the background color because it was the least dominant  shade and I did not want to take away from the strawberries!  I used copies of vintage California travel books on the left for some historical fun.

You can see I could have just used this shot of Dyllan eating his strawberry  for the layout…but I wanted to also include the fields. Because someday they may not be there anymore. (which make me sad).

For my title, I used a die cut machine to make the letters and some brown ink to distress their  edges. I used a tool that reminds me of a catcher for olives in a jar, because it catches little cotton pom poms for me to dip in ink and use for distressing. Q-tips work equally well.

I cut one of the “R”‘s in half to fit on the top of the lay out. Do you see those rows and rows of gorgeous vegetables? For the journaling, I used scraps of white card stock. (It’s amazing what a few scraps can do for a layout!)

I made my own strawberries by free drawing and cutting strawberry shapes from red card stock. (*TIP- The less anal you are about the shape…the better they look!)  I made the green leaves and stems from green paper scraps too. To make the seeds, I used  glitter glue,  and also did the same seed detail to a strawberry in a photo on the layout! Can you find it?

Over all, I’m very pleased with how this page spread came out…and I hope I’ve inspired you to take advantage of your surroundings too!

Random Extra’s #11

Look for old travels, cooking, music books at library book stores or garage sales and use those pages in your layouts or make copies of them for multiple uses!

Tags: layouts, Tutorials

This entry was posted on Friday, August 20th, 2010 at 2:43 pm and is filed under General Chatter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.