New month, new kit, new format

Hello crafter's...its that time again...I am in love with this month's kit as it offers so much variety and versatility. I was flicking through lots of my older family photos which were all in storage containers and photo albums, no one ever really gets them out to look at them, which is a shame. My family wanted to take those photo's to capture that moment in time and it is now a part of our history.
So I decided I wanted to try my hand at making an 8.5 x 11 album. Money is tight for me at the moment...I have plenty of A4 albums laying about my house and also tonnes of page protectors...you really needn't buy the special ones they recently bought out. Pop to your local Wilkinson's or somewhere similar, they have lots of lovely goodies to offer.
But anyway I digress...here's my first childhood layout in this format, if you've yet to try this size...I strongly recommend it...I had soo much fun :D

So you may be thinking, she's not a child on this photo...You would be correct. I recently turned 30 and this is one of the photo's I took whilst I was getting ready for my birthday meal. I decided to make a front cover for the start of the album, so anyone who flicked through it would know the purpose of why it was created.

As soon as I saw the My Mind's Eye On Trend gold foiled paper I oooh'd and ahhh'd and maybe even stroked it a little. I knew I wanted to get as much out of the paper as I could. It was far too pretty to use as a full sheet (in my opinion).
So I started my layout by cutting an 8.5" x 4" strip off the card stock and adhered it to the top of the page to give it an eye catching wow factor. Underneath that I stuck on the camera embellishment from the Simple Stories Life in Colour Ephemera pack and one of the 3x4 cards from the same collection's Cut-apart Sheet. The every day and star embellishments were also from the ephemera pack...there was so much in there...and one can never have too much ephemera!!!

Can we just take a moment to absorb the beauty of that thicker's font...I am a sucker for cursive fonts and when we had the option to choose I hoped and prayed I would get that set. I chose the title Life and then used some of the stickers from the Photo Play Family Ties Alpha sticker sheet to spell out the word documented and then used some of the sentiment stickers which read "a record of my personal history" and "that is how memories are made. So many things in this collection inspired me to create this album and they really co-ordinate perfectly!
Here are a couple of close up shots so you can see the goodies I used in better detail.

Look out for more A4 layouts like this as I had so much fun creating them, and it also stretches (an already huge kit) even further!!!
Happy Scrapping everyone xx