Summer Days with Sunshine & Happiness

Good morning lovelies! Brenda Smith [1] here with you today to share a pocket page spread I made with the fun and vibrant Sunshine & Happiness [2].

One of my favorite things about pocket pages is that they can be made quickly if desired; simply print your photos and pop in some filler and filled-out journaling cards and you're good. I often take an approach similar to this one, with maybe a little extra embellishing tacked on to the end (I like my embellishments!). But today, I wanted to spend a little more time with my pictures and supplies and decided to print up photos at odd sizes to place on top of the cards and patterned paper.

I use photoshop to resize my photos but this can be done in any number of programs you may already have including Silhouette Studio and Microsoft Word (you can google more thorough tutorials but essentially you drag the photos onto your canvas in your program, pull at the corners to resize, and print). I usually print them somewhere around 2.5"-2.75" square. Sometimes I'll alter this to make more or less space on the card.

I try to keep my embellishing to a minimum when making the photos smaller. I want the photos to remain the focus of the page. I usually layer a few die cuts on top of and under the photos and add a little journaling and call that card done.

I am typically a heavy journaler and am always worried that my pages will look like a big block of text. I used my computer for the journaling this time and I made sure to include ample line space between my journaling lines. I find that by adding the little bit extra space, it instantly makes the page seem less heavy.

I needed a few embellishments to be a bit smaller for my purposes so I coordinated the paper collection with the digital Sunshine & Happiness [3] collection and resized certain embellishments in Photoshop before printing out. Again, this is something that could be done in free programs as well. Don't be afraid to make both digital and physical work together for you. Resizing and printing out digital elements is way easier than you might fear.