Sea turtles are sure to induce a squee or two out of me every time I see them, so when Darren and I walked into The Dig aquarium at Atlantis while on vacation a few years ago and sea turtles were one of the first things I spotted...yeah, major squee fest right there, totally in public. And I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Supplies:

InLinkz.com

I scrapped this layout many moons ago for Bella, and it's the second one I mentioned in this post where I explained the whole "not quite in the newsletter" bit that happened. I'm happy to have scrapped this layout, newsletter or no, because I had quite a lot of fun working with Bella's Sand + Surf collection and am so happy that they were kind enough to send it to me!

While working on this page, I just had fun piling up the layers and clustering the embellishments. I tend to flip back and forth between messy, hand-cut edges on paper layers and straight, clean cuts from my trimmer, and this page definitely uses the latter. I never can decide which I prefer, so I just go with whatever strikes my fancy that day and run with it.

When it comes down to it, this page was really just about having fun for me. I scrapped some photos that I liked without caring if anyone else would really consider them "scrap worthy," and I did my happy layering and clustering thing without worrying if the design would be "good enough." And, really, it's a great reminder that that's what I should be doing all the time!

Layout - ID4 5K (Bella Blvd)

I've had two layouts for Bella Blvd waiting in the wings to post for quite a while now, and today I'll be sharing the first of them. Originally I was asked to be the "Bella of the Ball" in their June newsletter, but then the April issue was never published, and eventually the April content was used for June instead. I was then slated for August, but August's issue was never published, and by the time the next newsletter came out in the fall the CHA Summer 2013 product would be out, making my layouts with the Winter and mid-season releases look a bit..."dated," I suppose. So Bella gave me the go-ahead to just post my pages here on my blog instead.

Whew. Okay, enough inside baseball...how about a layout?

Supplies:

InLinkz.com

Bella let me choose the two collections I wanted to work with, and I made sure that one of them was All American. I love a good red, white, and blue patriotic collection, especially since I end up with so many photos around the 4th of July. For this layout I used some of my photos from the Independence 5K last year, when my cousin Michelle and I ran it together. She won her division, and I took third in mine with a (then) PR of 26:09 (which I actually beat at this year's ID4 5K!).

I started this layout with the circle cutout from my Silhouette, then arranged the photos around it. With six pictures taking up a lot of the real estate on this single-page layout, I kept the embellishments and patterned paper pretty simple- just a few border strips across the top and some round elements to fill in the cutout circles. I also popped the title up on some skinny bits of foam tape to make them stand out a bit more.

I'll be posting my second Bella layout soon, and I'll also be back tomorrow with a new edition of Friday Favorites. See you then!

thanksgiving at home

Surprise! I have one more Bella Blvd. layout to share as part of the design team there, after all! Just a few days after I turned in my last blog assignment, design team coordinator Laura Vegas emailed and asked if I could do one more page for Bella's October newsletter. My very first Bella assignment was actually for the 2011 October newsletter, and taking the assignment had a very "full circle" feel to it.

Just like that 2011 assignment, I was once again asked to participate in "Challenge on the Blvd." with the challenge of making a layout using four photos, a variety of Bella's buttons, and the new Thankful collection. Note: The challenge was incorrectly identified in the version of the newsletter that I downloaded- not sure if it's been fixed or not.

Four photos is sometimes a bit of a stretch for me since I like my photos to come together to form a block or row, but with this particular set I had mixed sizes that didn't fit that neatly together. The variety of colors, patterns, stickers, and accessories in the Thankful collection made this page easy to embellish, though, and it came together fairly quickly. And the buttons? I used lots of those in a row across the top of the page- quick, easy, and adds a lot of punch!

You can download a free copy of the Bella Buzz newsletter here- it's always packed full of great inspiration and fun challenges.

And now my term at Bella really is officially over!

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Supplies (click on images for product links):

InLinkz.com

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