Disney pocket page: Belle insert

I mentioned before that our experience at “Enchanted Tales with Belle” was one of the most magical parts of our trip to Disney World in 2016 (see all the pages in the album so far), and so I decided to expand the story over a couple pocket pages and then have a 12×12 layout to culminate. This pocket page recounts the story of my daughter’s interaction with Belle at the end of the attraction.

As I worked on embellishing the photos and journaling cards, I discovered that the Echo Park “Beautiful Life” collection flower stickers were a great coordinate for the roses in Shimelle’s “Starshine” collection!

My daughter was feeling quite shy, so she didn’t participate in the storytelling (though she could have if she had wanted to!), but at the end, she definitely wanted to meet Belle.

She walked up to Belle and gave her a hug, and her tiara came off!

Princess Belle was so lovely– instead of me putting it back onto V’s head, she said, “Oh, let me!” and gently placed it back on my daughter’s head.

“This is beyond MAGICAL” stamps from Kelly Purkey (Clearly Kelly/Hero Arts)

After that, they twirled together and curtseyed:

It was such a sweet, incredible experience to see my 5-year-old daughter, who at the time was completely enamored with princesses (she imagined them as her constant companions), get to interact with a “real” princess for the first time.  Belle was amazing, and made this whole encounter so much better than I could have imagined!

Stay tuned for the 12×12 layout (finally! haha!)…

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pocket pages: January 2019, part 2

I showed you part 1 of the January 2019 pocket pages a couple of posts ago, and now, here’s part 2!

I kept the theme going and continued to use the Studio Calico kit + Echo Park collection pack that I used for the first spread.  I started by choosing cards and cutting 4×6 and 3×4 pieces of paper to put in each pocket with the photos, then fine-tuned each section with journaling, layering, and embellishments.

Here’s a closer look at the left-hand page…

The top left pocket is another flip-up– inside are all the wristbands that we wore for our family swims this month.  Family swim was a big part of our lives for the first six months of this year, and I plan to include a collage like this for each month’s section of the album.

I also included some screenshots of the things that Husband and I watched together this month, and other little photos of random happy moments– big trucks working near the bus stop, a special Sunday school class…

This spread has more of the greenish yellow from the kits, rather than the more golden yellow of the previous spread.

The right-hand page of the spread has more random everyday-life types of photos, along with the beginning of the story of my ankle.  Little did I know in January that I would still be dealing with it now…

This pocket is actually a little paper bag with a tag slipped inside to tell the beginning of the story.  The doctor’s card is in the envelope, too, but mostly because I want to remember that he wasn’t a very good doctor.

…and the story continues in the bottom right-hand pocket, where I have another flip up; this one is about the appointment with the orthopaedic doctor.  Inside, I have his card (he is much better than the doctor I saw previously!) and a story about my son, who accompanied me to the appointment.  He was an amazing little buddy.

I am particularly proud of the bottom left-hand pocket of this side: it’s a collage of all the projects that I did in January.  It was a wonderfully productive month, and it is really neat to show off everything all in one spot.  I intend to do project round-up cards in each month’s section as we go on through the year, too.

I have two inserts to add to finish January 2019 for my album!  Stay tuned!

 

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pocket pages: January 2019, part 1

a little background… Early in the year, I was thinking about my memory-keeping projects and realized that while I have quite a few of them in-progress, not many of them are using current photos.  My kids are old enough to know that I take LOTS of photos (and they want to be in them!) but young enough that they don’t have easy access to my phone or computer to view them digitally.  I wanted to make a project that would let them see everyday photos more easily in a physical format.  They really love my Day-in-the-Life photo books, and this would be a sort of expansion of that idea.

As I considered the format of this project, using inspiration from my current favorite scrapbookers (Inkie Quill, Shimelle, Jen Schow, Ali Edwards, and others…), I decided to make it a mostly pocket-style album with both “traditional” layout and pocket inserts. The pockets will make it easier to include tiny/small/everyday stories with the flexibility of telling bigger stories as well, whether it’s in those pocket pages (as coordinating pockets), a pocket insert, or upgraded to a full-on layout.

I’m taking it month-by-month rather than week-by-week, but I’m making as many spreads as I need to tell the stories and fit the photos I want to include.  After the month is over, I sit down with my photos and my ephemera to decide what will go where.  I use empty page protectors and a set of cardstock templates in my typical photo sizes to plan everything out (You saw a glimpse into my planning process if you watched my 200 Persnickety Prints video!)

.  .  .

For January, I decided to use a combination of the remaining bits of my Studio Calico May 2012 “35 mm” kit (yes, you read that correctly… 2012!) combined with parts of the Echo Park “Times and Seasons 2” (which has a copyright date of 2013! wow…).  Even as I was starting to plan this album, the color palette of the Studio Calico kit kept coming to mind.  It was a nice surprise to see that the Echo Park collection complimented it so well.  (I’m really trying to make a concerted effort to use older products that I’ve squirreled away.)  The aquas, greys, and blacks reflect the cold weather, and the golden tones go well with the warm indoor lighting in many of these photos.  I also dove into my collection of Project Life cards for coordinating journal cards.

The first card in each month’s section with be a sort of title card, and for January, I created a cut file: a frame with a script “January” across it.

Inevitably, I have some longer stories that I want to tell, and rather than make a whole layout for this one, I made a flip-up.  I wanted to tell the story of B’s building skills with a little wooden 3-D puzzle kit.  I made sure to add a tab to signal that this part is interactive.

As I was putting these cards together, I was finding them looking a bit flat, so I started adding a bit of foam behind certain elements…

…a little bit of pleated tissue paper here and there…

..and paper layers.

I really like the dimensionality and softness that these touches added to the spread.

Stay tuned for part 2!

 

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Mini album: appendicitis

During January, I was deep in Disney album mode, and I got a lot done for that album!  It was exciting–and I used that momentum to plan out more of that album.  However, somewhere toward the end of the month, I found myself getting a bit burnt out, so I decided to switch gears to an entirely different scrapbook project.

When V was four years old, she developed appendicitis, and our ordeal involved emergency room visits, an ambulance ride, and a few days’ stay at the hospital.  When I told her (now 7 years old) that I was working on this project, she said, “Why would you want to make a scrapbook of that??”  And it’s true, it’s not something that you might think of right away to document in a pretty scrapbook.  However, throughout the entire situation, we felt very blessed by the Lord: His protection and His provision, and I wanted to make sure to document the experience and how He was at work through it all.  I’ve had the photos printed for some time, intending to make a mini-album, but I just hadn’t gotten to it.

Recently, a friend gave me a 7″x7″ Creative Memories album (strap-hinge!! I love strap hinge!!) that she no longer wanted, and I decided that it would be the perfect home for this story.  In addition, one of the January Use-It-Or-Lose-It Stash-busting challenges from Crafty Jen Schow had me looking at my stash in a new way.  The challenge was to use themed product for a non-themed project (or vice versa).  When I pulled out an untouched collection pack of Echo Park’s Head Over Heels line, I realized it could work perfectly!

I made this album “all at once” in a vaguely batch-processed manner.  I got out my photos and my Lightroom catalog (complete with photo captions, of course), and I sat down to write out the whole story on scrap paper.  Once I had the story written, I determined my maximum number of pages for the album (dictated by the actual physical pages I had available), and I divided my photos and ephemera in story-order throughout the pages.  I tore the journaling into chunks to lay with each of the photo groups so that I knew how much of the story was going with each page.

When I realized that I couldn’t come up with just one layout for all the pages, I started trying to make them all different…. but that was equally unfeasible! There are only so many ways you can arrange 3×4 photos on a 7×7 page! After I determined a few page designs I liked, I just tried to spread them out in the album so that no two neighboring pages (except the one double page spread) were alike.

Speaking of 7×7 pages—wow, that was a difficult size to work with! I can see why it didn’t catch on… you can only cut one full page out of a 12×12, and there weren’t enough papers in the pack to do a full background on every page, so it became a bit of a puzzle game for me.

This album used up almost the entire collection pack!  I have two full sheets of paper left: one full-page pattern and one cut-apart, plus most of a second cut-apart.  There are a few stickers and some letters… and a few smaller scraps!

I also decided to add doilies throughout the album; partly because I wanted a layer that I could carry throughout many, if not all, the pages, and partly because I was on a doily kick from the Belle layout I’d made just before this project!

I finally finished this album in May, when I completed a photo order that I’d been assembling since the beginning of February!

The title page has no photo, so I used one of the cut-apart cards with letter stickers and the word “appendicitis” cut with my new Cameo (did I mention that I have a new Cameo?).  The font is Farmhouse Country.

Here’s a look at the whole album “at a glance:”

…and a look at the individual spreads.  Almost all of the journaling (and there’s a lot…) is on the tags that tuck into pockets in the pages.

The final three pages are pockets to hold cards and notes that Vivian received from loved ones.  We were overwhelmed with the outpouring of love that we experienced through this ordeal.

The finished album is quite thick, and I hope that my girl values it as a testimony to God’s provision and protection during this scene in her life.

 

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Layout: decorating 2009

This layout is the third in the scrapbook-a-layout-each-(week)day challenge I gave myself for the last week of September.  I have to say, having the deadline of “finish this today!” really helped me to just make some decisions that otherwise might have stalled me.

I already had the photos printed for this layout (another one from before my daughter was born), and my only notes for them was a title: “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas.”  There really wasn’t a lot to say about them, since they really are just about our Christmas decor that year.  I have a “before” and “after” photo of the living room of our condo, as well as three detail shots of our Nativities.

In some senses, one might say that the set of photos wasn’t worth scrapbooking, because there isn’t much of a story.  However, I’d begun to forget what our condo looked like at Christmas– it was two homes ago now!  In fact, when Husband looked at this layout, he confessed that when he looked at the photos, his first reaction was, “where was that again?”  Haha!  I’m glad to have this little snippet of our grad-student lives documented.

After a ton of hemming-and-hawwing (almost as much as can be fit into a naptime when your goal is to actually *finish* a layout that day!) I came up with this banner-under-the-main-photos configuration.  I’ve already forgotten if there was anything to inspire it!  I pulled out bits and pieces from my dwindling Christmas supply to embellish the banner.

The word “Christmas” is cut with my Silhouette using the “Bruselo Script” font from The Hungry JPEG (Crafter’s Bundle).  Again, I used the layering trick, cutting two more layers from kraft cardstock and gluding them together to give dimensionality to the main title word.

Last but not least, I added a teeny cluster at the top of the page, and then it finally looked finished to me!

Supplies:
patterned paper: Echo Park “Times & Seasons 2” Numbers; Lily Bee “Christmas Town” Sleigh Ride; Lily Bee “Audrey”  (don’t know the name!)
kraft cardstock, creamy white textured cardstock
alphas: Glitz Designs “Uncharted Waters” aqua stripe teeny alphas
embellishments: Lily Bee “Christmas Town” cardstock stickers; Making Memories fabric labels; Making Memories ribbon; Lily Bee “Christmas Town” rubons; crochet thread; Tim Holtz Tiny Attacher
Silhouette SD: Bruselo Script with slight offset; tiny tag of my own design; print-and-cut labels modified from a Silhouette store design
other: tiny heart punch; Glossy Accents; Project Life 0.3 black journaling pen; Scotch ATG, Therm-O-Web foam adhesive

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Scrapbooking Disney: princess scrapbook

As I mentioned in my first “Scrapbooking Disney” post, one of the first projects that I wanted to do was create an 8″x8″ princess scrapbook for my daughter.  Her biggest highlight of our time in Disney World was meeting the princesses.  She is four years old and LOVES princesses.  To her, the princesses are completely real, and she has an imaginary entourage of them accompanying her at all times.  In Disney World, she was finally meeting her imaginary companions in-person, in-the-flesh.

I chose one or two photos of V meeting each princess (we ended up meeting Belle, Cinderella, and Aurora twice at different venues; I picked the best two of the photos from each of the meetings, even if it was a different actress in each) as well as Doc McStuffins, who is high on the list of favorite characters (and part of the imaginary entourage, as well!).

I developed a basic “sketch” for each 8″x8″ double-page spread: princess photos on the left, autograph on the right, and went with a monochromatic color scheme for each layout (all but Snow White– hers has yellow, blue, and red).  As I mentioned in my sneak-peek post, I entered this set of pages into Shimelle’s color-blocking challenge.  I’m not entirely sure if it is technically color-blocked, but Shimelle’s color-blocking blog post had a definite influence on the design I settled upon for these mini-book pages.  After a lot of unnecessary deliberation, I decided to use the same Echo Park paper collection (“Beautiful Life”) that I’d used for my memory notebooks and autograph clipboard, and I added three sheets of purple pattered paper for the “purple” characters.  One sheet is from the BasicGrey Kioshi collection, and the other two I purchased at Hobby Lobby.

I raided my trims and ribbons (thank you again, Grandma!!) for anything glittery, sparkly, and shiny — I was really surprised at the amount that I found!  The trim accompanies a border-punched strip that spans the two-page spread to help with continuity.

As I assembled the pages, I just kept wanting something more, even though I was trying to keep this book as simple as possible.  Wood veneer has been on my embellishment wishlist, and since I wanted it as fast as possible, I headed out to Michaels to pick up their wood veneer flowers.  I backed a flower with a circle punched from patterned paper, and following Glitter Girl’s (Ep. 127) lead, I scrunched a double-layer of fine white tulle behind them.

 

Here are the pages:

For the cover page, I took a favorite photo of V from the trip– wearing a princess dress, in front of Cinderella’s castle!! — and layered papers and a doily behind it in a way similar to the princess pages.

I added the blue patterned strip to help the alphas to show up better.  I wanted to enter this cover page into Shimelle’s weekly challenge, to use lots of letters, but life in the form of emergency rooms and hospitals happened, and I’m posting this later than I’d anticipated!  I used a combination of Echo Park letter stickers from the collection pack and Making Memories stickers from a wedding collection.  A large wood veneer with more tulle finishes off the page!

This book is already a favorite with V.  She looks at it often at home, and when we had to make a trip to the emergency room for her (and then have a hospital stay), I was so glad to see how much this little scrapbook comforted her!

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Memory journals and autograph clipboard

In January, we took a trip to Disney World!  My husband’s family gathered for a fun-filled five days at the parks.  It was pretty epic for us– Husband did virtually all of the planning and arranging, and I had a head full of projects for the trip.  I’ll be doing a series of posts related to all of those projects, including several for “Project Princess Dress” (alluded to in my post about V’s Sofia dress!)  And now that we’re back, I have even more projects swirling in my brain!

But first, I want to share the very last projects I made for our trip!  I knew that this trip would be an intense influx of memories, and I wanted to have a good way to document them in detail.  I’ve mentioned it before, and I’ll mention it again, my memory is not very good.  Unless I take photos and/or write things down, I forget them so quickly that it actually stresses me out 😉  After a lot of thought, I decided to make myself a set of trip journals.

I could have brought one single journal, but I thought it would work better to bring one small one for each day.  I planned to keep it in the bag we’d carry in the parks so that I could jot down notes and quotes and other details during downtime moments, like waiting in line.  Having an individual journal for each day meant that I knew that the others were safe in our hotel room in case something happened to my bag (rain, theft, etc.)  I could take as much space as I needed.

To entice myself to really, truly use them, I made them pretty 🙂  I used an Echo Park Paper collection by Laura Passage called “Beautiful Life” that I had on my shelf.  I won it a year or two ago in a giveaway, but I’d never opened it!  I thought the colors were evocative of the Disney palette without being overtly Disney, and I thought the little day-of-the-week flag stickers were perfect for my journal covers.  And I used some doilies! 😉

The journals are 4.5″ wide by 6″ tall, and the sheets inside are printer paper cut in half, folded, and stapled (thanks for the long-arm stapler, N!); I basically followed the same construction as the activity books I made for V for long trips.

Inside, I gave myself a few prompts.  On the first page, I listed the park we’d be going to on that day, as well as the initial list of FastPasses, reservations, and other attractions we definitely planned to see.  I also included a space to write notes about the weather.  (P.S. the font is “Waltograph” and the aqua text is a stamp set from PaperTrey Ink)

The next two pages have prompts to list the food we ate, anything we bought, and then there was a page to fill in with the favorite moments of the day, after I’d written everything out.  This will be an instrumental planning tool for my scrapbook!

Finally, I left a lot of blank pages to write out all of the “magical memories” we made each day.

The journals were perfect.  I didn’t end up writing in them during the day as much as I thought, because we went at a very low-crowd time of year and Husband planned our Fast Passes really well, so I think the longest we ever waited in a line was about 20-25 minutes!!  However, I made it a priority in the evenings, after our kids were in bed, to sit down and write down as much from the day as I could.  I wrote some as prose, some as lists, but I tried to get everything documented in as much detail as possible.  I referenced each day’s photos to prompt my memory, and Husband even contributed (see, he really is the best!!)

I must give credit to Natalie at Almost Never Clever for her inspiring and encouraging blog posts about keeping a travel journal (e.g. here and here).  They were on my mind as I stayed up after everyone else in my hotel room was asleep!  I knew if I didn’t write out all of my memories before the next day started, some of them would get lost.

The other last-minute project I made was a simple decoupaged mini-clipboard so that V could get character autographs, if she chose.  This project was directly inspired by Jennifer Webb, on the Magic Memory Keepers podcast.

I used ModPodge to adhere another sheet of paper from the same Echo Park collection to the front and back of this very inexpensive clipboard, and then I added coordinating ribbons to the clip to make it even more festive.

I cut a small stack of plain white cardstock to 4″x6″ and brought a small handful of colorful Sharpies for autographs.  I have plans for the autographs that we got!

 

 

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