The page that took me three months to make

This is the second day that I will share the pages that I've made but not posted this summer. Today? The one that I spent all summer making.

First, I got an idea. Wouldn't it be cool to make a page about the places I go to all around town? I got the idea from the class Twelve. I thought it would be cool if I got a panorama shot of the town, so I went to a high spot in town near a bar called The Lookout, took a photo, and enlarged it to 8x12.

The shot wasn't that great, though. Composition-wise, it was a panorama of a bunch of houses with the quarries and Minneapolis in the distance. I thought maybe I could pair it with a cool photo of the carts in front of Target, but that seemed just sort of incomplete. So the page idea stewed for a while.

Then, a brainstorm: Maybe I could take a photo of each sign of the places I go, print them small, and add them to the other two photos? It took me ages to take all the photos (and I doubtless looked like a freak doing so), download them, print them, and trim them.

Once I printed them, the page came together quickly. Here it is:

 

 

I was at the end of my June Studio Calico kit. I wanted to make 4 more pages out of the three kits I'd gotten. I had already made 11 pages, so there was not much left. I used orange cardstock on the left, then orange patterned paper on the right. I also added the cloud vellum to the right, putting it on top of aqua patterned paper.

All the small photos (2.5 inch squares) I sanded the edges of and adhered with Stampin' Up! dimensionals.

I also used a lot of Elle's Studio tags. Here's some around the title:

And here's some at the other corner.

This is a basic page design tip I learned from Stacy Julian: If you put something on one side of the layout, put it on the other side too. Since I like asymmetry, I like to put it on the opposite corner too.

On a two-page spread, I also like to have elements spanning the pages to connect them. I did that with the small photos and the tag:

So this was an almost three-month long layout. What's the longest you've spent on a page? :-)