Creating Kris ~ a young mom blogs…

6th Grade Scrapbook Layout + Paper-piercing Technique

Well I haven’t shared a scrapbook layout in a while but it’s mostly because I haven’t been scrapbooking as much these days! I’ve mostly been sticking with the smaller crafts like card-making because they are shorter to complete and therefore less painful. But I wanted to keep catching up with my kids’ albums, so I finally got to the layout with the photos from Harmony’s first day of grade 6 (so just about 1 year ago!).

First Day of Grade 6

Materials: Riding Hood Red card stock & ink, Chocolate Chip card stock & ink, Only Orange card stock, chocolate brown ribbon, white jumbo brads, Chocolate Chip felt flower, orange flower brad, yellow mini brads, red mini brad, fall multi-colour brad, red metal frame, white Creative Memories letter stickers, various-sizes circle punches, scallop circle punch, stamps from various Stampin’ Up sets, and several different patterned paper sheets in oranges and reds.

This is actually a good time of year to do these Back-to-School and School Album layouts because we are very much getting into the Back-to-School mood these days! With about 3 weeks left of summer, we’ve done some shopping for school supplies and I have done a lot of online shopping for the kids’ clothes. I’m glad my son doesn’t mind – too bad little miss preteen is a little fussier about that! She is far more used to getting to go shopping at the mall. It was a yearly tradition that I have really had to give up the past couple years. She says she doesn’t *mind* pushing me in a wheelchair at the mall but it’s just not the same and I just can’t go as far and as long as I used to, so we can’t get it all done in one shot like every other year. Thank goodness I have some fond memories still tucked away in my foggy brain of previous trips and also some pics in her album to show her!

Side Note:I’ve re-organized the albums in my Scrapbook Layouts Gallery to show the more current albums on Page 1 of the gallery. It also made me realize I have not yet uploaded the pictures of layouts from Avery’s First Year scrapbook (one of my fave albums!) so I’ll be sure to do that soon.

Back to this layout… I tried out a new technique for paper-piercing the “6″ on the layout and my trick worked pretty well so I wanted to share it…

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Teacher Thank-you Cards

Sorry to be a little MIA on the blogging scene… I have been up to my eyeballs in thank-you cards for oh… about the last month or so! But of course I’ve enjoyed it very much, especially now that I have a new comfy chair just for me at my craft table! I totally appreciate anything that makes it a bit less painful to get little snippits of work done here and there in between my daily routines of resting and coping with chronic pain.

I was pleased as punch to get an order for a set of thank-you cards for a customer to use as Thank-You cards for teachers. The school year has now already wrapped up where she lives (in the U.S.) and it sounds like the cards were a hit. Such a nice feeling to know that my work has traveled far away and been appreciated by others.

After making that batch, it was time to work on designing a set of Thank-You cards for my kids’ teachers. I hope they also go over super well! I find personalized cards really great to show people you wanted to do something special to show you appreciate them. This set turned out to be one of my very favourite card designs in a long time… the colours are bright, yet I find it still evokes a sense of beauty and serenity.

Cardstock: I combined my usual Stampin’ Up colours (in Certainly Celery for the base and leaf, with Pink Pirouette on the inside) with some new textured cardstock made by Bazzil (in pinks) and patterned paper (in blue). Stamp colours were Pixie Pink, Pink Passion, Tempting Turquoise and Green Galore. I used stamps from 4 stamp sets! Life is Beautiful for the 2-step stamped flower and circle on the inside, Thank you Kindly for the “Thank You” sentiment on the front, small flowers and half of a “thank you so very much” stamp from Flight of the Butterfly on the inside, and the leaf stamp from the set All Through the Year on the front.
Embellishments: The dark pink ribbon is from Michaels (I think their Basic Narrows line). For a little accent touch, I used some light green rhinestones for the flower centers. Techniques used included rounded corners (just on the tops and bottoms of the top different pink pieces on the front, which I think brings them really “together as one”, don’t'cha think?). The blue paper was punched with the new scallop edge punch. The front flower was raised with a Stampin’ Dimensional.The inside writing block was paper-pierced on the side and of course I had my usual inked edges in there.

On top of those thank-you cards, I also created two other batches as well! I don’t know if I’ll have any left after I send out some cards to thank people for celebrating my 30th birthday with me, but if I do you may see them up soon in the KStar Store. I’ll post the designs and details in another post. Also stay tuned for a post with great Teacher Gift ideas, coming this week!

Scrapbook layouts: Harmony’s school album

The only traditional scrapbooks that I have to work on these days besides our Christmas album are the kids’ School and Birthday album. The school one is fairly challenging to me because I started each one out using Creative Memories’ “set” of school pages. So each school year has a pre-created page with really old-school (no pun intended) decorations, and then every last page in their year (flipside of the first page) has some decorations in the bottom corner. I’ve tried to incorporate these existing elements while still being able to create new-style layouts and I’m not always pleased with the results.

These layouts are the last pages in Harmony’s “Grade Five” section of her school album.

So I ended up being really pleased with how the soccer one turned out, but not so much with the Track & Field Layout. I think I’m starting to clue in to the fact that having a good patterned paper as a base really helps me along. And sticking with a few select colours in my palette instead of being all over the place. Funny how after well over a decade of scrapbooking, I’m still refining my techniques!

I’m glad that I created the books to only go until the end of middle school years… so grade 8. Harmony is already in the habit of avoiding pictures and not smiling for them so my ability to capture good photos is becoming more and more limited! I wish you could somehow get the message across to kids how precious these memories will become once many years (and then decades!) have gone by and they don’t remember them anymore or need visceral clues as a trigger of those memories!

There are a couple other new-ish layouts in there that I can’t remember whether or not I’ve shared here. But in any case, you can access the whole album here: Harmony’s School Album. Just please ignore any spam comments you may see! I just noticed the first ones now and have no idea how many there might be. Would hate to turn the comments off but that may be what I need to do. One of the downsides of having a blog, I guess!

Thanks for looking! Stay tuned for more, because I’m working on both kids’ albums these days and have finished some of Avery’s first layouts in his Senior Kindergarten section!