Hi there, Stefanie here with another step by step process of my scrapping!

I start with selecting my photos and adding them onto a plain white back ground, just with a slight stroke (25px) and drop shadow to them. I have a set of effects for PSE that make this a very easy step. I play around with their size and make my focal photo top left, where the eye enters the layout and then have a nice diagonal draw from top left to bottom right.

Then I work from the background upwards, adding a series of paper layers, to add to the vintage theme and to highlight my story of the vintage furniture. I love neutrals as backgrounds and this brown one has delightful textures and shadows as well as grungy text which gives it a delightful interest, even as a neutral.

Then I added some of the splatters and brushes in 4 different spots on my layout. It is more usual to have three spots, making a visual triangle, however because the brushes line up vertically they add to the band deign of the foundational layers.

Then I play with the goodies in the kit, a metal bookplate houses the date and visually anchors my focal photo. The journaling on a journal card introduces a fresh green colour which I used to move the eye throughout the layout in a different visual triangle, the lace at the top, the crown flair and greenery and then the journal card. I layered more items across the bottom of the layout to increase the visual weight there and to add interest, charm and dimension.

I save it as a PSD file and a jpeg for printing, run a resize and save for web action so that it can be uploaded to galleries.

I hope that you will give my process a try and see if it helps you in making choices and speeding up your scrapping process.

I used Second Hand for this layout.