Autumn Template Album #2new and on sale: http://www.oscraps.com/shop/Autumn-Template-Album-No.-2.html
Harvest Artplay Palette: http://www.oscraps.com/shop/ArtPlay-Palette-Harvest.html

Because of the structure of my family album, I had only one page available to hold six pictures, and no page in the template set offered that capacity. So I picked a template that would mostly work, then flipped through the other templates to see if I could find a cluster of frames I could grab and drag onto the right side of the layout. There was. I had started with Autumn Album 2_10 as my base, then used the frame cluster from Autumn Album 2_7 for the additional frames.

This is a really busy page so I wanted something organizationally soothing for the background, something to act as one big mat for the photos. And I needed it to be fast because I was due back in the yard for Fall cleanup. My easy solution was using two sheets of ArtsyPaper #3, on multiply mode, and then adding ArtsyPaper #6 on overlay just to pop up the color in the center. It IS a party, after all.

I did the journaling next and then the wordart. I wanted to fuss with the wordart because my mind is loaded with lots of ideas from Anna's new WordART class, but alas I ran out of time so only applied a little shadow, bevel, and stroke from the layer styles menu to the words.

For embellishment I used elements from the artplay palette and then threw on an edging at the last moment, just to break up the black.