New Two-Page Layout

I was lucky enough to attend a weekend crop last weekend, and I was able to get 19 pages done in 2 days!  Now that may not sound like much to some of you...but I put a lot of thought and effort into each of my pages, so I was pretty pleased with my totals.  Plus, I got lots of chatty time with my big sis, made some new friends, and got to have a bed to myself without DH and the fur-friends! 

Here is one of my two-page layouts, using my Cricut and my Gypsy.

The page base is a tan Bazzill cardstock, and I added some printed paper from my stash to fill the bottom of the page, and the top and center stripes. My photos were mounted on a coordinating sage cardstock.

After I laid out the photos, it was time to add the title and embellishments. On my Gypsy, I used the bracket from the Disney - Hannah Montana cartridge, and welded it to a simple rectangle from George & Basic Shapes, to give it a more solid shape. I cut two of these brackets in the same paper as the top stripe. Since the trees in the photographs was lacking most of its leaves, I selected one of the bare trees from Paper Doll Dress Up. I cut that in a chocolate brown, but it didn't stand out against my printed paper enough, so I cut a large circle from the same shade of paper as my base pages. The Peek-A-Boo title was welded from the Quarter Note cartridge. If you are looking for a nice script font that welds together easily, this is the cartridge to do it! I used my Zig Glue pen to glue the title to the page. I added a journaling box to balance out the layout, and used the bracket cutouts to highlight both the title and the journaling box.  I used some neutral buttons, held down with glue dots, to give some dimension to the second page.

To make the brackets appear as if they were sewn on the page, I used a brown Sharpie to draw stitch marks on each of them. I also outlined each of the brackets with the same marker, after they were adhered to the page. Finally, to bring more continuity to the page, I wanted to place a dotted line along the sides and bottom of each page. I'm a little bit of a perfectionist, and I didn't want my dots to appear too haphazard, so I pulled out my Tim Holtz ruler, which has awesome holes evenly spaced all the way down the ruler. Using a paper piercer, I lightly pierced every other hole all the way around the pages. Then I went back afterwards with marker and placed a dot on each of my piercing marks.  It was tedious work, but I think it really made the pages look more interesting!

Cricut Cartridges:
Paper Doll Dress Up
George & Basic Shapes
Disney - Hannah Montana
Quarter Note