Hoover Dam SB Layout- updated & finished!

two posts in one day!! don't count on it happening very often, but I didn't want to wait any longer to post this:

I finished the Hoover Dam 2-page scrapbook layout! It took me a few weeks of mulling things over and working on it a bit at a time-- to be honest, there was more mulling than working till yesterday afternoon, when I worked for a couple hours straight and finally got all the elements stuck down. 

Here's the finished updated layout (click on any photo to see it larger):

I added quite a bit of lighter colored paper to get rid of the plainness of the kraft- a distressed ledger paper on the left-hand page under the title and at the top of the right-hand page; I also added manila shipping tags around the layout for grounding the embellishments.

 I added quite a bit of texture and interest with chipboard and 3-D foam tape- the 'before' title was flat (boring) stickers, so I re-did it using chipboard letters (see the photo below for an explanation). You can see in these detail photos that I edged all the light colored papers with Distress ink (in 'Vintage Photo' ) to give them added dimension.

yellow chipboard alphabet stickers (American Crafts Thickers, maybe?)

I really liked these particular chipboard sticker letters for the font and size, but they're yellow-- so they got sanded, base-coated with gesso, painted with two coats of barn red acrylic paint, then sanded and trimmed around the edges... voila, red chipboard letter stickers that match my layout! (that was part of the reason it took a couple weeks to finally finish the layout- but I think the result was worth it.)

A look at the updated title section and the 3-D 'America' embellishment. I added a couple pennant flags with sticker letters, some additional punched stars, and used 3-D foam tape for interest. Much better! I also 'grounded' the whole area using the manila tags, so it wasn't just 'hanging out in space' any more. I added the polka dotted deco tape to each of the long borders for a bit of extra dimension and to bring the light blue into those areas.

This photo is the upper-right side of the two-page layout showing one of the other embellishment areas. A few more punched stars and red and blue label stickers give it some added color. I added short captions for each of the pictures to the journaling tag. If you read it, you'll see I made a spelling error on the. very. first. line. (drat!!) but I just left it alone. I didn't want to mess around trying to find something else to use for journaling, and I figured anything I did to cover it up would just bring more attention to it.

Above is the bottom right embellishment cluster: more manila shipping tags, red and blue label stickers, and more punched stars. If you look at this photo and the one above, you can see that I only really used one blue sticker (round) and one red label sticker (the rectangle). I cut both of them in half and overlapped them so you can't tell they're only partials, a clever trick I learned from watching Shimelle's scrapbooking videos. (Actually, all of these embellishment ideas are ones I learned from Shimelle; she has a wealth of design information available, both on her blog and in her 2Peas videos.)

The photo above shows how I labeled each of the photos to go along with the journaling captions- I typed the numbers on the same ledger paper, punched them out with my circle punch, and inked around the edges of each circle to match the rest of the paper.

And here it is again, just for reference: the 'before' layout in all it's unfinished plainness and boringness.

I quite prefer the 'After" layout.  I think I'm going to add a 6 x 12 insert to this layout so I can add some historical facts about the dam, maybe with some additional detail photos of the architectural features-- so I'm not done scrapping this visit after all. But I'm really happy with how this layout turned out!