August 29, 2012

[Weekly Mojo Series] Spotlight: Laura Kurz

Occasionally I like to feature scrapbookers and photographers in this space who have what I think of as an authentic perspective on memory-keeping and living with photographs. Laura Kurz is a scrapper whose outlook on scrapbooking and its role in her life (and the lives of her family members) really resonates with me. Laura's style bucks the trends and instead celebrates the beauty of a photo that -- although technically not perfect, perhaps -- embraces the perfection of each moment.
I asked Laura to share her thoughts on memorykeeping and photography with our readers. I hope you enjoy what she has to say.


When it comes to selecting photos for her layouts, Laura uses the following process:

"About every 2-3 months, I upload my photos that I want to print to Persnickety Prints (usually between 100-200). Not all of these will make it on to a layout, but all will make it into my albums. I have every picture printed in wallet-size, and then I choose some to have larger prints made. The ones I choose to print larger and use on layouts are usually just the pictures I  simply like best. I am not much of an "event" scrapbooker, more of a moment scrapbooker. I also have a professional photographer come and take our family photos once a year and I rely on those a lot for my albums. I use my blog posts a lot for journaling, so I will often try to figure out which photo goes best with the writing and have those enlarged. For pictures that I don't use on layouts, I put them in baseball card holders just with tags to say what month it is and maybe a typed-out caption. (See below). I feel like these photos cover more of the "day-to-day."
Laura most commonly orders prints and scrapbooks them in a standard letter size, 8.5x11, but she says that "lately I've also been having a lot of 6x9 printed as well, so there will be pages with those coming up in the near future!"

You can definitely see Laura's love of large focal point photos -- her pages often feature one large photo on one half of a two-page spread, with patterned papers, elements, and journaling on the other page. She also uses her photographs as the "background" of her layouts, adding paper strips, tags, and journaling right on top.

Those same characteristics carry over from Laura's pages to the walls of her home as well. Laura says, "I am a huge fan of grouping big photos together in my house. Actually, I'm a big fan of photo (and artwork) groupings in general. I think with my layouts and using the large photos, I go for a visual impact, and I do the same thing with my decorating."

Thanks, Laura, for giving us this glimpse into your photos and your process.

Until next week, keep the mojo flowin'!


3 comments:

  1. what a fun surprise to see Ms Laura K here :) totally enjoyed this... she rocks!

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  2. I LOVE what she has done with her walls! Thanks for the story!

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  3. i LOVE the wallet sized photo idea. I really have to figure out how to "trim down" the amount (or maybe just the SIZE!) of my photos - I am running out of storage space for my albums, and my kids are still LITTLE!!! thank you for giving me something to really think about!!

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