Double page layouts?

I've been thinking about double page layouts a lot lately, especially as I had planned to send pages to print in July, but didn't. "Why not?", you ask. I didn't send pages to print in July because I joined my first creative team in late May and while I love it, it seems to have put a crimp in my regular scrappin'. When I began digiscrapping I only did two page layouts because that is what I want to see in my album.  (I began my blog with some of my all time favorite 2 pagers, here.)  And I do print my layouts and put them in our annual album. Every year I make an annual album with a 2 page layout overview of each month, followed by detailed pages from that month about our everyday lives.  

But back to the current quandy: Earlier this year, I fell in love with store challenges.  They are so inspiring. And at first it was easy to go back and make every one-page challenge layout into a two-pager. (I have blogged about that in depth here.) But then I started CTing. And now my hard drive overflows with one-page layouts.  And at this point, I don't see how I find the time to turn them all into two page layouts for my scrapbook unless I quit my job. And some just don't seem amenable to two page layouts. So I am thinking (gasp!) of printing one-page layouts and putting them in albums. How horrible would that be, dear bloggy readers? How horrible would it be? (I am really asking, feel free to answer in the comments.)

The good news is that all this thinking about my double spread quandary has caused me to try to make more double layouts for both store challenges and CT commitments.  After all there is no rule that they have to be 12" x 12", it's just a habit I've somehow fallen into. For example I recently made this layout for a challenge at ScrapOrchard. (My apologies for showing this layout again, but it is central to this post.)

This "Polar Coaster" layout is from a day I call "Angel Fire Fun Day" (My husband and I go to Angel Fire once a year, every year, so why not give it a name?) The following two layouts are also from Angel Fire Fun day and they are both about my niece, Zoie. The green one was made in late May for a scraplift challenge at Gingerscraps and the white one was made recently for a CT commitment.

Lifted from "In My Heart" by ktkadoo
Kit used: U Made me Wub Ewe by Pretty in Green
Individual Elements:
Black corrugated paper, black lace flower border and heart beads from So Girl by Craft-tastrophic Designs
Textured cardstock (recolored) from CU Textures Vol 01 by Captivated Visions
Scatter from Everyday Blessings by Ellie Lash
Fonts: Century Gothic and My Own Topher

(You want to hear something funny? I just realized that I lifted this page from Key of D Designs, who I now create for. Back then I had no idea whose layout I was using for the lift challenge. This digital scrapbooking community is a small world, no?)

Template is Spending Time with You by Unforgettable Moments
Kit is Midsummer Sunset by Unforgettable Moments

Now, I had half-way convinced myself that these two layouts were similar enough to not look terrible side by side in an album, especially if they followed the coherent "Polar Coaster" double-page spread. And besides, I really love both pages.  But then, a couple of weeks ago the creative forum discussion at DigiShopTalk (DST) was all about two page layouts and we were challenged to make a two-page layout.  I posed these three layouts and the questions above to the people at DST and then I decided to morph the two layouts into one coherent double-layout in response to the challenge. I thought it would be easy. In my mind, I was swishing papers back and forth easily. It was more time consuming than I thought, mostly because there were so many layers. And all the background papers for half of the layout were mid-way through the layer stack. (I began by dragging both layered layouts onto a 12" X 24" canvas.) Here's the final product:

Zoie

(Click image for larger view)

Do you want to hear the bad news, dear bloggy readers? I have 4 other single page layouts from this day.  Sigh. I do believe I made all these layouts when I began re-taking the basic digital scrapbooking classes at Jessica Sprague when I moved from PSE to to PS CS.  This is by far my favorite of the four:

You
You and Me Quickpage by Jessica Sprague

I guess the only thing to do is to keep on scrappin'.