This is the very first first-day-of-school layout I’ve ever made! I guess it’s because it seems like the first day of school is a fairly momentous occasion each year… and I didn’t even tackle her VERY first day of kindergarten…yet. I decided to start with first grade!
This layout is published in the Fall 2021 issue of Scrapbook & Cards Today; you can see it on page 65!
I’ve had this title planned ever since that first day of first grade– “It was awesome!!” was her immediate answer to my “how was your day?” upon getting off the bus that day! In fact, I jotted down a little sketch almost right away, which I’ve saved all these years! The end result is completely different, but that’s ok! (and yes, I finally recycled this scrap of paper as soon as I finished taking this photo!)
As you can see, my original thought was to make this a single page layout, but when I started looking back through the photos, I wanted to include so many more than would comfortably fit (and still be big enough to see well!) on one 12×12. I expanded my design to 2 pages, using nine 3″x2″ photos and one 4″x6″ feature photo.
Even though starting school makes you think of fall, in our area, it is still very much summer weather! I decided to use a color palette that bridges the two seasons– and included a lot of red because our red front door is hard to miss in the pictures!
I arranged the small photos in a grid and filled the spaces with a dark blue patterned paper. I stitched around the perimeter of the blue pieces to add a bit of texture. These blue spaces were also the perfect spots to add embellishment clusters.
I stamped and heat embossed cameras in white on aqua patterned paper and cut them out to be the feature embellishment in each cluster. To bring in more of that fall flavor, I die cut leaves from textured orange cardstock and golden yellow patterned paper to add to each cluster, along with bright yellow puffy stars!
I combined three different alpha sets to make my title and subtitle: I used all capitals for the main title, and lower case alpha for the subtitle, and the tiny letter tiles unify them.
Supply list:
patterned paper: Close to My Heart “Mix In” (Mar-Apr), Close to My Heart “Blue Skies,” Echo Park “Spring” (Journaling Cards –B-side is striped)
cardstock: American Crafts (white textured), The Paper Studio (orange textured)
vellum: The Paper Studio
alphas: Amercian Crafts Thickers (Daiquiri white foam), Close to My Heart (white alphabet foam stickers), Glitz Designs Teeny Alphas (white)
stamps: Shimelle “Head in the Clouds,” Hampton Arts “Vintologie”
puffy stickers: Close to My Heart “So Much Happy”
label: print-and-cut via Silhouette Cameo 3
cut files: SCT Oct 2020 freebie, Kerri Bradford Studio (“Leaves”)
font: Gill Sans Light (bold)
other: machine stitching, craft foam, ATG adhesive, Zing embossing powder (white)
Vegetablog 
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