It's become a habit of mine to create monthly photo collage layouts. Sometimes I have several photographs that I really like and that show what we did during the month, but I don't always want to include them as their own page in my album. So, I've begun making collages of them and writing a little bit about each month instead. It's a great way to get the essentials into my scrapbook.

This particular layout sketch is a great one for either a collage of photographs as I've done here, or as a way to incorporate a large photograph such as an 8" x 12" portrait.

Supplies:

• Scenic Route Paper - Collection Packs - Sumner
• Scenic Route Paper - Die Cuts - Arrows Background
• American Crafts - Letter Stickers - Monograms - Mumbo Jumbos - Brown
• Signo - White Uni-ball Impact Pen
• Zig Writer - Green
• Zig Writer - Brown
• white cardstock
• 3-D Dots - Adhesive Foam Squares - White - 1/8" Thick

Instructions:

1. Crop photographs to fit an 8" x 12" opening. You can crop them to fit exactly or you can overlap them for a more collage-like look.
   
   
2. Arrange photographs and adhere the photo collage on the right-hand side of a 12" x 12" sheet of white cardstock.
   
   
3. Next, trim a 3 ¾" x 12" strip of patterned paper. I chose a subtle design with primarily one color since my photographs were fairly overwhelming. Adhere the paper strip on the left side of the white cardstock, leaving a ¼" space between the photo collage and the patterned paper strip.
   
   
4. Mat a focal photograph and adhere it to the upper left corner of the layout, slightly overlapping the photo collage. My focal photograph is trimmed to about 4" x 5" and matted on cream-colored cardstock. I also outlined the photograph with brown pen on the photo mat.
   
   
5. Add alphabet stickers along the right side of the focal photograph to vertically spell "JUNE".
   
   
6. Add a "?" sticker next to the "E" in "June" and outline it with a white pen.
   
   
7. On cream cardstock scraps, write out the words "what", "did", "you", "do", "in", "we", "were", and "busy" with a brown pen. Then outline the words and cut out each word.
   
   
8. Outline a small arrow die cut and adhere it just below the focal photograph.
   
   
9. Adhere the subtitle words with three-dimensional foam adhesive.
   
   
10. Next, handwrite your journaling in a bullet-style list on cream cardstock. Outline each "bullet" and cut them into strips.
    
    
11. Lay the journaling strips over the collage of photographs and arrange them how you would like them to appear. I chose to do a vertical list over a photograph with some dead space (the bowling lane), but you could also randomly place the journaling strips throughout the photo collage.
    
    
    
    
12. Adhere some of the journaling strips directly to the photographs, and adhere others with the three-dimensional foam adhesive to add depth to the journaling.
    
    
13. As a final step, I added a white pen border to a photograph in the lower right portion of the layout to add a little bit of extra "oomph."