Another Gatefold Spread

 

I am really jazzed about using Stampin' Up! supplies for scrapbooking.  I understand they just started carrying scrapbooking supplies shortly before I started as an independent Stampin' Up! Demonstrator, but I only recently realized all that they now have for memory keeping! 

One of the biggest challenges I have had with scrapbooking in the past is the time it takes to find papers that coordinate with my pictures.  With Stampin' Up! products, I know at a glance what colors will go well with my photos and can quickly see what papers contain those colors.  As always, it's nice to know that I have coordinating markers and inks and cardstock to make my task easier!

I've also had a challenge with figuring out how to embellish my pages without just throwing flowers willy nilly.  Sometimes flower embellishments fit the theme - but sometimes they don't!  Stampin' Up!s stamps and dies are great for creating some of those embellishments.    

And THEN, there's Stampin' Up!s scrapbooking workshop kits which make the whole process easier still!  With papers, cardstock, and embellishments that all go together - plus step by step instructions for building the pages.  I look forward to using some of those scrapbooking kits as I get them in the future, but for today, I'm just using some older Stampin' Up! papers I had left over - and also older Stampin' Up! cutting dies for embellishments (when I didn't find something pre-made in my stash that would work!).  Though I love to use the newest things, some days I just have to do with what I have!

You'll see that the first page is a standalone.  Then I have a gate fold spread.  

Years ago, I picked up some special gate fold sheet protectors on a close out sale.  I LOVE them and wish I had more.  Unfortunately, they will soon be gone and I'll have to figure out something else - it appears they haven't been manufactured for a long time now.  I think they might have been from Colorbok, but I'm not certain.

Anyway, when scrapbooking, I prefer to keep pictures from a specific outing to a single or double-page spread, but sometimes, there are just too many pictures I want to use!  That's where I use these gate fold sheet protectors!  The left hand page is often my title page, but in this case it is a standalone.  Then the right-hand page becomes a gate fold that opens to display another couple of pages worth of photos!  The layout you see above is what you see when you open this particular gate fold.  I call them page 17C (left hand flap), 17D (center page), 17E (right hand flap).

I'll show you page 16, and then give you a closer look at the entire gate-fold spread of Page 17 ABCDE - which covers our trip to Central Florida's Zoo & Botanical Gardens.

Page 16:

This standalone page makes use of leftovers from two different paper packs.  The red is from Flowering Fields, and the gray is from Take to the Sky.  This is an example of how versatile Stampin' Up! papers are.  They are usually themed on one side, but the reverse, though it goes with the theme, is a more universal pattern.  I don't have a picture of the other side of the dotted red, but I CAN show you the reverse of the gray patterned paper:

As you can see, the flip side of the paper wouldn't have gone at all, but the gray pulls in the colors of the photos perfectly and without clashing the theme of the page.

Once I got the page laid out and the photos in place, I had to decide what to use for embellishments.  I thought maybe some deciduous trees would work, and thought about the older set of Stampin' Up! decorative masks and cutting dies that I had - called Frosted Forest.  I had thought to use both, but when I pulled out the dies, I really liked those by themselves!  If you look closely, you'll see that I didn't always use the entire die cut tree.  I used part of it to create "bushes" near the bottom right corner of the page.  Because one of the tree trunks seemed to be hanging out in mid-air, I fussy cut a little piece of "dirt" for it to be growing out of.

Page 17 A & B:  All 5 parts of the gate-fold are from the Central Florida Zoo & Botanical Gardens.  Here are the first two half pages that form the outside of the gate fold.

This time I chose butterflies for my embellishments - die cut from Stampin' Up!s Beautiful Butterflies die set.

Page 17 CDE:  When we open the gatefold, this is what we see:

Now for a closer look at each page. 

Page 17 D:  

The center page is of gorgeous birds.  I used flowers from my stash (made awhile ago using Spellbinders dies).  Stampin' Up! has many flower dies to choose from.  Stampin' Up! also has lots of greenery-type dies to choose from.  This time, the white and green sprigs are from their Painted Lavender die set.

Page 17 CE (flip flap closed):

 

Here are the outside flaps - pulled together to fit into one picture.  The first (17C) has a grid of pictures of flowers from the botanical gardens, while the second has pictures of the porcupine and tortoise that they had nearby.  The papers used on both of these are from the Lovely Garden paper pack.  I thought they added a bit of interest to the page and coordinated with the plain black of the center page without making the spread a lot more busy - the pictures are plenty busy enough!  You'll also see that I used a yellow scalloped edged mat (an old Spellbinders rectangular cutting die), to tie all of my subtitles together.  Then, I thought it might help pull the eye around the spread and coordinate the pages even more if I added some of the same sprig embellishments - along with a bird and flowers (from my stash).  

 

I ended up with too many pictures than would fit on that last page about the porcupine & tortoise.  I didn't want to leave them out, so instead chose to use a Flip Flap.  I LOVE flip flaps!  They're from Stampin' Up! and are clear pockets (they come in several standard sizes) with an adhesive strip so you can EASILY attach more photos just by adding this to the outside of the sheet protector!  The tortoise at the bottom of the page is inside a flip flap.

 

Page 17 CE (flip flap open) - and here's what you see when you open that flip flap:

Another picture of the porcupine and of the tortoise!

So, there you have it.  Another set of pages for my 2019 travel scrapbook.