Baseball Birthday Layout

This weekend my photo order arrived and I was able to start back on a little scrapbooking! One of the sets of photos that came were from my son's birthday last month, so I started working on those.

I've noticed that scrapbooking birthday layouts for my boys has gotten a little trickier as they've gotten older. Finding good, age appropriate birthday papers and embellishments can be tough, and most of what I do find in the the stores I've already used or seems to be geared toward younger kids.

So this year I took a different approach and instead of using just any birthday themed supplies that I could find, I decided to focus the attention of the page to the birthday cake. My son chose a baseball themed cake, so I created a baseball themed birthday page to go along with it.

I tried to focus on color scheme and a few patterned papers to accent the colors in the cake. I chose the green-on-green plaid paper because I thought it looked a little like the pattern in the grass of a baseball diamond. The red and grey chevron paper accented the baseball, and I had a sheet of baseball stitching that I cut a few strips from for the top banner.

I'm quite happy with how it turned out even though it's not necessarily a typical birthday themed page. It's good to try something new and create something with a different look than all of the other birthday pages I've done of the years!

Why You Never Use Magnetic Photo Albums

The very first "scrapbook" (if I dare call it that) that I ever created was a travel book that I made after a trip with my best friend to Mexico in 1998. It was really my first experience traveling, and when we returned we decided to make scrapbooks of the trip. Looking back now it was really very, very primitive. But it was 1998 and the popularity of scrapbooking was just beginning to grow and I didn't have any idea what I was doing. I put some pictures and ticket stubs in an album, printed out a bunch of labels and called it good.

My biggest mistake was not the lack of any real type of creativity, it was in using the wrong albums. Yup, I used the old magnetic style photo albums and didn't really give much thought to how these albums would look or hold up over over the next 15 years. I knew they weren't the greatest albums to use at the time, but I was young and not really planning ahead. I pulled the albums out today and noticed that they are not in good condition and they are yellowing and deteriorating. Some pages seem fine while the page right next to it is yellow.

Here is why you never use magnetic style albums (these photos don't really do it justice, it looks a lot worse in person):

So now I'm faced with a bit of an unexpected project - making new albums. I'm kind of excited at the idea of creating something new with these old photos, and kind of sad at losing my first scrapbooks no matter how sad and boring the pages may be.

If I do redo the albums, I think it would be fun to take some "before" photos of these old albums and some "after " photos of the new albums. Scrapbooking is constantly evolving and as new products come out our own styles and techniques change as well. Looking at these photos now I have so many ideas of how I would do them differently - papers and patterns that I'd use, color schemes, labels, journaling.

I think I can make the album fairly quickly - as the photos are all 3.5 x 5 and I can get several on each page. I would probably add several of things that are not in the albums now - like maps, maybe some signs I can get photos of online, and journaling cards.

Has anyone ever redone an album in a situation like this? How did it turn out? Any tips for me?

Road Trip: States Collage

I had created these states collage pages back when I finished up our Road Trip album, but I wasn't sure how much I liked them after I finished them. Since the papers were printed with graphics and the state names, I couldn't really overlay patterned papers like I usually do, so I decided to just use a bunch of photos from on the road in each state and do a collage. I tried to include the highways we drove, any roadside attractions or things we saw, and also photos of us in the car.

I still like the idea of a collage for each state, but if I could do them over again I might do them a little differently. I do like the pages and I'm glad I have a collage for each state, but this is a good example that sometimes ideas don't turn out exactly like what you had in mind, and not every scrapbook page that you make will turn out awesome. And that's okay. This was just one idea and next time I will try something a little different.

Puppy Layouts

I've made some decent progress on the large stack of 250 puppy pictures that I took last year. Over the last 2 weeks, I've finished about half of the stack - creating 25 2-page layouts.  I started the album with the photos of the first day we brought Scout home, and am just moving forward chronoligically with the photos. I've skipped around a little bit, doing some of the later photos before the earlier photos, but plan to keep the album pages in chronological order. Here is a sampling of the pages I've made so far:

It's been a little hard figuring out what photos to put on which pages with each other, since I often have just 1 or 2 photos that were taken at the same time. So I've been grouping them but also just filling in spaces with photos that will fit that space. In an attempt to keep the layouts to a minimum (and keep it to one album) I'm trying to get at least 4 photos on every page, if not more.

So far I've used 3 scrapbook kits on these pages - a Karen Foster kit, a Paper Studios kit, and an Echo Park kit. Since I'm using so many photos on the pages I was able to stretch the papers pretty far. I am now basically out of supplies to I'll need to purchase a few more pet-themed things to work through the rest of the photos. 

Ice Skating Layouts

I finally got back into some scrapbooking this weekend - mother nature decided that winter was going to stick around for at least another weekend - so amid the snow and wind I pulled out my supplies and got to work on a few layouts. 

I finished up the layouts from our ice skating adventure - it was the first time we've all been ice skating as a family, and my younger son's first time on skates! We went to a local hotel that has a rink - it is very picturesque, right along the lakeshore and surrounded by the historic hotel. We went early on a Saturday morning and for a while we were the only ones there.

For these layouts I used the Simple Stories Snow Patrol collection, which I also used for the snowshoeing layouts. I had quite a bit left in the kit so I wanted to use it up since I loved these papers so much.  What I planned to be 2 2-page layouts somehow grew into 4 2-page layouts! I just had so many pictures that I wanted to use!

The Snow Patrol kit had several journaling cards and other cutout tags - I tried to use a few of them - the patterns and designs are cute and I wanted to add at least a little journaling to this page, since I tend to struggle with journaling.

Hopefully this will be the last of winter around here and we can move on to some fun, outdoor spring activities!