Picture Perfect

It was a long time coming, but I finally got to get back down to my scraproom and work on a new two-page layout.  Of course, I'm still several months behind, but it was nice to get back in the groove a bit. 

Have you ever scrapped "anti-photos?"  You know the ones - the photos that didn't turn out like you had hoped.  The photos where one kid is crying and one is looking the other way.  In our case, we had a lot of photos like that from our photo shoot back in March so I decided to devote a layout to showcasing our "anti-photos."

I used a sketch from Allison Davis' Sketches for Scrapbooking: Volume Four.  I don't have her incomparable talent, nor the skill to create such amazing embellishments, so I tend to look to her designs for inspiration and then fudge them to fit the photos and papers I have.  For example, that cluster of buttons in the lower left corner?  That was the last thing to go on the layout because there was a blank spot that I wanted to fill and I dug through drawer for about 10 minutes before finally deciding to pull some items from the Animal Crackers collection to see what I came up with.  Voila!

Following Allison's blog also inspired me to try something new with this layout - inking the edges of paper.  I know, the rest of you scrapbookers have been doing this forever, but I just finally tried it out with the journaling block on this layout.  I love the way it adds a slight bit of dimension!

What do you do with your "anti-photos?"  How about any tried and true scrapbooking techniques you always fall back on to make a layout special?