Last 4th of July we were in Washington DC for vacation, and we surprised our youngest son with a trip to Nationals Park. He is a huge baseball fan and our home team happened to be playing there over the 4th. Even though it wasn't the warmest day and we got quite a bit of rain that day, it was great experience and I had so much fun scrapbooking this. I took about a million pictures that day, so I'm quite proud of the fact that I only made 5 layouts for this!
We left our hotel that morning and hopped a cab to go to the stadium. My son didn't know where we were going, but kept asking along the way, and I kept making up different answers to distract him. When we pulled up, we couldn't see the stadium, just the parking garage - but there were these decorative baseballs all over it and he started to ask if we were at Nationals Park. As we approached the gate, we got our tickets out and showed him and he realized that the Brewers we playing! He was thrilled! Once inside, we watched the players warm up and the boys were both given baseballs that they later got autographed.
I created 5 layouts for this using a collection of baseball supplies by Moxxie called All Star Baseball. I chose this collection because it most closely matched the color scheme that I was using in the rest of the DC album, and I liked all of the red, white, and blue and star designs it included. It worked perfectly for baseball but also the 4th of July.
For these layouts, I tried to add in a lot of little details from our day, including our tickets, photos of the scoreboard, the flag ceremony, and the running of the presidents. I also printed out team logos and a logo from the stadium.
I'm quite happy with how these came out, and they are some of my favorite pages that I've probably ever made.
Thanks for looking! What is your favorite thing that you ever scrapbooked?
I finished up the last 2 sports cover pages this weekend. I'm kind of working ahead here, and making cover pages with placeholders for future photos. It's kind of risky, as no one knows for sure what the future will hold, so I'm going out on a limb here and assuming that my son will continue to play these sports for the next few seasons. He's a bit of a sports fanatic so I think I'm pretty safe.
I started a new baseball album with photos from 2015 and forward since the other album is completely full. Since I already had the 2015 layouts completed, I just needed a cover page for the album.
For this layout I just used the back side of the first layout in the book, which happened to be a double-sided sheet with the black and white baseball words on it. I mounted a red 8x11 sheet in the center, and cut 5 black pieces to mat the photos on. I was able to download and print out the baseball league's logo and add that to the design. I added a baseball themed card to balance out the geometric layout, and used an arrow punch to make the white arrows.
Since I tend to make about 10 pages per season for baseball, I'm again assuming that I'll be able to get 4 seasons worth in this one album - or about 40 pages. That seems to be about the maximum number of pages I can comfortably get into a ring-bound album, so I'm going with it.
I also created the cover for the next soccer album. This album should hold 2 years worth of soccer (4 seasons with spring and fall, plus a few pages of indoor), so I've set up the cover page to have his current team and season, as well as his next years team and season.
This layout was again pretty simple - I double mounted the photo squares and added a few strips of soccer paper. I printed out the header banner with the logos, and added a row of soccer word stickers along the middle and bottom of the page. I had these large soccer brads that I had found on clearance at a local store, and thought they'd make a nice touch to the banners.
If feels good to "work ahead" a bit and have these pages done. I don't know why I never did cover pages for these albums before, I guess the albums were always a work-in-progress with new layouts being added each season. I never thought to do covers for them since they were always changing. With the albums now more permanent, all I need to do each year is add the layouts for that season and put a small photo on the cover page. This should make it easier to stay caught up!
Well I went ahead and got the new albums yesterday - I went with the ring-bound ones. So I had a project yesterday to take apart the old sports albums and reorganize the pages into the new albums. I only got 2 albums to start with, which both ended up being used for soccer layouts, and re-used one of the post-bound albums for the baseball layouts. Once I had the albums reconfigured, I realized that they will now need new cover pages since I've shuffled around what is in each album, so I started on the cover for the baseball album.
Since I've had this idea of doing more timelines in my layouts, I decided to a timeline of sorts of the baseball teams he has played on over the years. I had 5 years of photos in this album so I pulled out 5 journaling cards and started to put together a layout. The idea was to make them look like baseball cards, but I had no stats or anything so I just simplified it and used a photo and a banner.
This layout took me WAY more time than I care to admit! From just working through the layout, to printing the labels, to choosing and resizing and printing the photos, I easily had over an hour into this layout, maybe closer to 2 hours. There was just a lot of detail work with all of the labels, banners, and arrows.
I'm pretty happy with it and I like how the idea of the timeline worked out. Now I need to come up with another idea for a cover page for the soccer albums, at least the first one since that album is complete and I won't be adding any pages to it.
As for the new albums - I just love them and will need to get at least one more. One of the new albums is filled with 3 years of soccer, and the second album has last fall season and is ready for spring season - and should fit all of next fall and spring as well. I still need one more album for baseball pictures from 2015 forward, which I should probably order soon before they are discontinued and I can't get the color that matches. Then I should be set on albums for at least a year or two.
Happy Friday!
