How to make 5 layouts in one week

I thought I'll share one of the ways how you could do more pages in less time. Five layouts a week is a lot for many of us, including me, but if you have a plan, it could easily happen. Here's what my plan was:

1. Look through magazines or online galleries for ideas and pick 5 favorite layouts. Make your decision now and try not to pick anything way too complicated.

2. Think of the pictures you could use for your layouts. Find pictures or order them. Planning ahead of time gives you opportunity to pick your picture size and their position. My photo box was full of pictures, so I didn't order any this time (but did order some before with a layout or sketch in mind). In this case I needed to make a little more cropping, since all of photos were 4x6.

3. While waiting for your pictures to arrive (if you order online), write journaling for each layout. By knowing what the story is going to be, it will be easier to pick a title for your page.

4. Pick two to three colors to work on for each page. Go with your gut. If you think this paper looks ok, it probably does. Don't go looking for more perfect piece of paper. Working with scraps might help the process. If I already got the piece cut in my drawer - I'll go ahead and use it. For all of my pages I only used one new piece of pattered paper - the rest came from the drawer of scraps.

5. Assemble your pages one at a time - one a day. That's the fun part! You can scraplift your page very close to the original (like I did in my first and fourth layouts) or you can use just one idea from original LO, like photo placement (that's what I did in second layout). I made them all in smaller format - 8.5x11, which saves the time for me too.

And here are my five pages. First one is a scraplift of Denine Zielinski layout. Unfortunately I don't have a link to the original LO because it was from a magazine. I repeated her color choices and added just a few little details.

Title letters are stamped with words stamp from Technique Tuesday (thought it fit the theme):

For my second page I used THIS layout by Ali Edwards as a guide line. I wanted to make one of the layouts very simple, plus there's not much you can put on a teenager page anymore. I picked grey as my first color choice (it was her favorite color, the last time I checked... but these change twice a day) and an orange, since it's the color of their school.

The letters "Y" and "N" don't stand for Yes and No. Those are initials of their first names. I'm very happy that she has another Russian speaking girl in school and journaling cards include what she has to say about it.

For the third page THIS layout by Roby Werlich. I love her work. By changing colors, page format and other details - your page may look a lot different from the one you started with. Even though I don't worry about that. These pages will go into my album, and not too many people will recognize that it was a scraplift.

I just had to add some rhinestones for a Baby Birthday page:

Next two pages were both scraplifts from Stephany Dagan's layouts. For some reason I could not find this one online (had it saved in my favorites).

Again, I didn't do much thinking here at all. I liked her color choice, so I just repeated them here too. Same with cluster of embellishments:

And the last one for today. It was cold enough to scrapbook fall page finally. I love Stephany's work and could scraplift all of her pages. I started with THIS layout to make my page.

... and a last close up:

It was a lot of fun to work on these, especially that all of them were made SO quickly! By doing so many layouts in such a short period of time you can learn a lot about your personal style too(later about that).

p.s. I did lie again about posting this on the promised day... well, my DH came home earlier then usual and you know... there was no blogging happening for me...

Thanks so much for stopping by and have a wonderful weekend!