July 16th, 2010 -- Posted in scrappy / stampy |
This blog post was written for (and first published on), the blog Ideas for Scrapbookers. I was super thrilled to be one of their Friday Featured Artists! I hope your find some scrapbooking ideas in this 1-page layout created for my son’s kindergarten section of his school album….
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I think part of the reason I’m dawdling on my son’s school album layouts is that since he’s my “baby”, once I am done all of his Kindergarten layouts, I’ll never be able to do those kindy layouts again! There are certain stickers and embellishments that really don’t apply so well in those later school years, so I think the last layout in his Kindergarten years section will be an entire montage of classroom-themed items from crayons to counting aids!
At least I did finally get started on his first layout of Senior Kindergarten (also known as “kindergarten 5″)… I continued to keep some of the colours and themes consistent with the rest of the album (bright colours, white rub-ons, geometric shapes, buttons, and contrast), while still giving the new layouts their own look.
This layout, for the First Day of Senior Kindergarten, starts out with a great background that has squiggly lines in primary colours. On the left side, two matted 4×6″ photos (one cropped a little to show more of the frame), with an embellishment of a scalloped circle with layers on top – a paper-pierced orange circle that’s “popped” out with dimensional adhesives, and a green inner circle with a white rub-on star. I wanted to keep the picture of my son and the bus un-cropped because it really shows the size difference!! He is still so teeny tiny compared to that big huge bus, even with his special hat to make him a bit taller (that was the school’s way of identifying which kindergarten class each child was in, based on colour). The journaling block in the bottom left corner has white rub-ons for “First Day” and the numbers in the blue circle, and a black rub-on letters for “SK”. The journaling is in white gel pen. The tiny green button is a cute little accent. In the right corner we have the third matted 4×6″ photo – you can barely make out my son’s little face in the 2nd window.
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June 4th, 2010 -- Posted in EZ-blog Oven, scrappy / stampy |
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!
April 8th, 2010 -- Posted in family, pics, scrappy / stampy |
Our “Family 2008″ album is now complete!
And now I can safely say that I’m caught up to a year ago as far as regular family photos go. I’m also mostly caught up on the kids’ school albums, but still needing to “fill in the blanks” as far as their birthday albums go. I’ve even recently discovered that my Family 2006 album is missing a title page (how did that happen!?), so I must go back sometime to put a little something together.
Here are pics of the two (traditionally) scrapbooked layouts:
November 2008:
December 2008:
One thing I feel like I’m really getting the hang of is doing 2-page layouts in a style such that each page could stand alone by itself, but also coordinates well with the one beside it. I definitely recommend using this technique if you have photos from, say, two separate events but are devoting a 2-page spread per month or something like that.
What’s Next?
Well, I did decide to go ahead and digitally scrapbook all of our 2009 Family photos. It not only saves me the money of buying a new scrapbook (I’m a keener on Creative Memories’ beautiful but expensive albums), it saves me sitting up at craft tables for hours and sticking by my usual laptop instead. This fits in much better with my current chronic-pain-filled life (that I’m still adjusting to…). Digital scrapbooking is one of the many activities I have managed to learn to do with one hand on the mouse, the laptop on a little table beside me, and the rest of me on the couch. And then there’s always the option of printing out the digital layouts and slipping them into 12×12 albums later down the road if I’d like to.
The only thing from 2009 that I will be scrapbooking (and have started already) is the pictures that go into my specialty albums: the kids’ birthdays and school pictures as well as Christmas. Time to get back to work on those soon (I really haven’t been scrapbooking all that much these days: even the two layouts in this post were done quite a number of weeks ago).
Happy scrapping and stay tuned to see more new hand-stamped cards and new digital layouts soon! 
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