Layout - Before & After

The other day I told the story of taking some family belly photos here and today I share the scrap page I made using the best set.

I struggled with this page for quiet a while! The photo is special to me and I wanted to do it justice.

I had a few options in relation to the theme and color scheme. I could have gone down the love path with lots of hearts or taken the baby road with rattles, bottles and teddy bears. I could have pulled colors from our clothing or made the pic black and white. 

Instead I chose to embrace our back yard and use the fence, rock wall and greenery to guide me. 

Kaisercrafts base coat collection was absolutely perfect for this and ultimately made my decision for me!

I decided to give my scissors a rest from this layout and ripped all the papers, showing the white inside to give it a bit of a rougher layered look. I love the word stick pin from little yellow bicycle, it was hard to decide which one to use, I nearly put them all on.
I print all of my pictures for scrapping using my borrowed-from-mum-with-no-intent-to-return hp photo printer. It is really old and very moody! It refuses to print decent 6x4 photos, always messing up the colour, so I use word, print them on an A4 sheet and cut them out. But sometimes even the A4 sheets will come out with funky colours. This happened with these photos numerous times and I couldn't just throw them out so chopped 'em up and threw them on too at an offset creating the perfect gap for the alphas and date.

I brought the ladder because I thought it went with the backyard-ish theme, but by putting the cut out square 'growing' under it made it more of symbolism of our family getting bigger. I left all the wood/chipboard bits raw to keep with the natural look of the papers.
I wanted to subtly point out that what was written on our belly in the first photo is what we are holding in the second, what better way then to use arrows! 'Magic happens' seemed like a perfect fit cause having a baby is pretty special, amazing and magically.

I wanted to put the word 'family' on my page somewhere and had lots of options in my stash, embellishments, alpha stickers, papers, rub ons etc I decided to keep with Kaisercraft and use there rub on words. However I didn't want it to take away from the photo, so after rubbing it on I got my scissors out of retirement and scratched at the word. Giving it a rougher look and breaking up the solid black making it look lighter.
The brick stencil has been in my stash for ages and what a fitting layout to use it again. I used glimmer mist with it over all of the ripped papers to help unify the layers.

The 'Homemade' bingo card lifts up to reveal my journalling: "I couldn't resist taking photos like this! It took a looong time to get photo #2, it was always raining! But we got it in the end + possibly a cold too!!" It really was freezing!
Thanks for checking it out!
XoXoX Nicole

Materials
Kaisercraft - Base Coat - Weathered
Kaisercraft - Base Coat - Rock
Kaisercraft - Base Coat - Corrugated Iron
Simple Stories - Harvest Lane - Bingo Cards
AC - Thickers - ??
Kaisercraft - Wood - Ladder
WOW - Chipboard - Narrow Arrow Pack
?? - Chipboard - Heart
The Crafters Workshop - 6x6 template - Bricks
Tattered Angels - Glimmer Mist - Creme de Chocolat
Kaisercraft - Rubons - Enchanted Garden
Kaisercraft - Rubon Words - Family
Little Yellow Bicycle - Word Stick Pins

Belly Photos

I think every mum-to-be must get photos of her belly!! Because, hopefully, your belly will never be that big again (unless of course you have more lillies).
And as much as I really didn't want/feel like having my photo taken while pregnant, I now love having those few photos to look back on. Unfortunately I didn't do weekly or even monthly shots  for Chloe (huge regret!!) and swore I would do it for Jayce. I didn't. (huge regret!!) But I HAD to have some pictures. And I just couldn't resist doing a cute family before and after shoot.

So I planned for Brendens mum to come around one afternoon and take a few snaps.

First up we just took a few shots of the three of us and one very big belly in our backyard.
You can't really see it, but Chloes singlet has an iron-on which says 'I'm the big sister', corny but I had to do it!

Then we did some before pictures.
Sitting on the couch one night while pregnant I looked over and saw Brenden leaning back making his belly look big with a beer in his hand, next to him was Chloe leaning back making her belly look big with milk in her hand and I came up with this belly photo idea.
(unfortunately I found similar photos on the internet a week later so the idea wasn't as unique as I thought)

Of course there were a few outtakes.

We put Chloe up on the rocks to try and get all our bellies at the same level but it put her too far into background of the photo so we moved our local to the other side of our yard and stood her on her sandpit lid instead.

We had our before shots so now we needed the baby to arrive so we could get the after ones. And exactly a week (even down to the hour) Jayce was born.
However for weeks and weeks after the weather was so terrible! We hit the heart of winter and it rained every single day! I was very frustrated by this and was driving Brenden nuts nagging about when we could get the after shot.
Finally on a Sunday afternoon the sun broke through for a whole two hours! My mum and aunty had just driven up from Victoria to come visit for the week. The moment they pulled into the driveway I shoved a camera in their hands and dragged them out the back.

I had kept all of our clothes from the original photo clean to make sure they were ready and waiting for when we could take the next photo. Of course this particular Sunday Brenden had dressed Chloe in these jeans then let her jump in puddles all morning so they were soaking wet, so you may notice she looks a lil shift and cold. Actually we were all freezing! But I got my photos =D

And the final products.

It took a bit of fiddling around with the colour, exposure and stuff but I think I got them pretty close. And they were well worth it!
I will always love these photos. So glad we did it!
XoXoX Nicole.

P.S.Wish me luck as tonight I attempt to drive the 7+ hours to my home town in Victoria with a 2 year old and 2 month old by myself...