Throwback Thursday: Using Paper Loft paper

A couple years ago, I went to a CK Scrapbook Convention here in Texas.  At the time, I didn't own a lot of quality paper, so I loaded up on some muted, more masculine colors for layouts of my husband and boys from the Paper Loft booth.  Sadly, that paper has been untouched in my stash since that time!

Challenging myself with this Throwback Thursday series, I pulled out all the Paper Loft I owned to do some layouts.  I did not have any embellishments, but I did have some Paper Loft cut-aparts which I used.

For the embellishments, I went to my stash, using navy chipboard Basic Grey letters (from my last Throwback Thursday challenge), buttons and other miscellaneous pieces.

The Paper Loft papers came from these collections:  For the Record, Old Town Tavern, Back Country and Autumn Splendor.  Here is what I came up with!

This is probably the most layered and elaborate of the three layouts I completed.  You can see buttons and twine from my stash, canvas letters from Making Memories, bingo card from Teresa Collins and the chipboard pen from Basic Grey Fact & Fiction

This is my handsome hubby, incognito with his "mountain man" look.  The heart is from Glitz, "love meter" sticker from Crate Paper, navy chipboard letters from Basic Grey, buttons from my stash, and tickets from Making Memories.

I absolutely love my Hub's new boots, and he laughed when I took this photo.  However, with photo editing and these papers, I think the layout is as awesome as the boots!  Here I used some brads from my stash, another Teresa Collins bingo card and the Basic Grey chipboard letters, along with other miscellaneous embellishments from the stash.

No process videos for these layouts this time, but I will be posting a couple videos using a kit that is "New to Me" from The Memory Nest by this weekend! 

Scrapbooking Process: Using up Stash!

This past week, I have been going through all our digital photos, making sure they were organized properly and saved all in one place.  The process included going through various CDs, my hubby's computer files, my computer and our external hard drive.  It was quite the job, but I have now compiled what I figure to be all the important family photos in one spot on our external hard drive, by year and by month, with all duplicates and renegade photos accounted for.  The phone photos were the hardest -- before owning an iPhone, the dates were not recorded on the photo files, so I had to match those photos to others where clothing and haircuts were similar!

Now that this job is finished, I feel as though important photos will no longer be missed that need to be scrapped.  Not that I will scrap all of them -- but I knew there were some random shots that told fun and interesting stories that needed to be in our albums.

Here is one of those stories:  My husband took our oldest son, when he was 5, for a very short, shaved, barber shop haircut that nearly gave me a heart attack at the time.  Looking back now, he was stinkin' cute!  

Here is my thinking process for this layout.  First, I decided to really dig in my stash and use only "old" stuff.  There is way too much paper in my paper box, so I need to get into it and start using it up.  I pulled some Paper Loft papers from different collections that meshed nicely together, plus a little bit of this and that from all over my scrap area:

Next, I chose a sketch.  Most of the time, I will start with Pagemaps.  This sketch from October 2012 looked promising and I thought it could develop into a two photo layout:

As you'll see from the finished layout, things didn't go quite as planned! First, I ditched the second photo. Since one photo was portrait and the other landscape, I couldn't find a way to bring good continuity to the layout using both.  Second, I turned the layout so that the long border grounded my focal photo better.  A switch of Paper Loft paper from greens to blues were brought in as well as a chipboard set from Basic Grey that I bought awhile ago at Big Lots and never used.  Since frames are making a big comeback, the rust colored frame from that set worked extremely well with my chosen papers.  

Finally, I brought in just a couple new items (I couldn't resist) to rev up the final layout:  a wood veneer and title letters from the Basic Grey "PB & J" collection.  Journaling will be added on a tag and tucked behind the photo later.  

Notice the Urban "tag" that I used on my layout? Rummage your home for things like this for your own ephemera.

Hope this gives you some inspiration as you scrap this week! What's your page layout process??