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!
After finishing the Baseball Cover Page yesterday, I moved on to the cover page for the Soccer album. This album has a lot of seasons of soccer in it (we have a split season so we have spring and fall, plus a camp and an indoor season), and I wasn't sure how to go about making a timeline for this - I knew I wasn't going to be able to make it all fit on a traditional timeline across the page.
I did like using journaling cards to hold a small photo of each season like I used in the Baseball Cover Page, so I used that technique again here - just with a few more cards.
I added a strip of patterned paper along the top and bottom of the page, and a small piece behind the center journaling card as an accent. But really there is so much pattern and design in the journaling cards that I didn't need or want to add much more to the page. I was able to download a logo from our soccer organization's website and print that out as well to add in the center. And that was it! Just two more sports cover page to go and I'll be caught up - and I'm working on them already since I feel like I'm on a bit of a roll!
