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!
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!
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!
This weekend I jumped into some of my new 2016 pictures and started on a few layouts. The first thing I worked on was a layout for a hockey game we went to in January. I was a little worried since I didn't have any actual hockey themed scrapbook supplies, so I just decided so use a few general sports themed things that I had, and to use some simple papers to create the color scheme I wanted.
Since I didn't take a lot of photos at the game, I only made one layout. I used white cardstock and layered on a black paper with dots, and a grey and black striped paper. I used some red cardstock to mat the photos, and added in our tickets and a journaling card. I also used the back of a journaling card to put letters on for the Wisconsin Badgers title, and I think it turned out great!
