... just Laura

Scrapbook & Cards Today: Grateful For Home Mini Album

Hey everyone! I'm back with a mini album share. Yes, you read that right. A mini album. I honestly can't even remember the last time I created a mini album. It's been years and years, other than a few 6x8 albums that I have started, in varying stages. So when I got my assignment for the Fall issue of Scrapbook & Cards Today, and saw the words "mini album" and "shaped album", I was scared.

Luckily, I was able to pick the shaped album that I wanted to use from Maya Road. Since they were looking for albums with a theme of gratefulness, I chose this house shaped mini album, with the plan to create an album about being grateful for my home.

I was also sent some patterned papers and stickers from Close To My Heart to work with. These tone-on-tone patterns fit my style perfectly, and I thought the colors worked really well for fall. For my completed album, I used just one of the silver rings to hold the pages together. I wasn't able to work in both rings, since my photos ended up being in the way. So I simply punched holes up near the roof, and added the ring there.

I am grateful for my home. After all, it's where I spend the majority of my time. I decided to focus on four of the main things I do in my home, since I had room for 4 spreads.

The shaped mini album consisted of raw chipboard pages. I started out by tracing the album shape onto several of the patterned papers that I wanted to include, and then traced it onto textured white cardstock as well. And then obviously, I cut them all out ;) I ended up needing 5 patterned paper "houses" and 5 white cardstock "houses".

I then spritzed all of the patterned paper "houses" with white misting spray, and all of the white cardstock "houses" with tan misting spray.

I decided I wanted to emboss the white cardstock "houses" for extra texture, using several different embossing folders. The paper was too big to fit into the folders, but since I knew that I was going to add photos to the white cardstock "houses", I simply embossed the top and bottom separately. There was a small gap, without the embossing, that was later covered by the photos.

After embossing the white cardstock "houses" and letting the mist dry on all pieces, I took them to my sewing machine and machine stitched around the edges of each "house". I thought about just using regular adhesive to adhere the papers to the chipboard album pages. But in the end, I decided to use Mod Podge instead, as I wanted to be sure everything was really secure and in place.

For my photos, I went with either two or four photos for each section. I printed them in small collages, sized to fit across the width of the page. I adhered them to the page using glue dots (my photo paper has a textured backside, so regular adhesive doesn't stick) and then added a thin strip of patterned paper above and below the collage.

I kept with the "home" theme, I added the "home is where I _____" to each spread, filling in what I was focusing on for that page. I went with chipboard alphas from Bella Blvd in white text, since I had plenty of them to complete all of my words (home, love, work, make, relax), and also because they fit perfectly across the width of the page.

I then die cut the word "home" several times, along with the word "grateful" for the cover (and both from Kerri Bradford), from brown cardstock. I used some tiny alpha stickers from Lily Bee to add the "is where i" to each page.

And last, but not least, I added some stickers from Close To My Heart that coordinated with the paper collection. One of the sticker sheets had these words on it, and I was able to pull out a word that tied in with each of my spreads. Like "hooray" for relaxing, "create" for making, "wonder" for working (kids have lots of wonderment about them!), and "laugh" for loving. Then I finished each spread off with a few label stickers, hearts, starts, geotags, etc, and a few coordinating enamels.

There were 4 additional mini albums featured in the article, and you can download the Make It Mini PDF file to see all 5 albums RIGHT HERE.

Kerri Bradford Studio: [inter] National Scrapbook Day

I've got a new project up at Kerri Bradford Studio today! I've had this idea to create a 6x8" All About Me album for quite a while, but have never taken the time to get it started. Sure, I do some layouts about myself here and there. But I wanted to have a place to record a variety of different things about myself, at this point in my life. Whether those things are serious, funny, or just plain random.

When Kerri asked us to make something for her [inter] National Scrapbook Day celebration, I figured this was a good time to get started on this album. And then hopefully, it will motivate me to add a few pages here and there over the next few months. Kerri has so many words, phrases, and shapes that have always caught my eye, knowing they would work great for an album like this.

I will most likely create pages very randomly for this album, and that's exactly how I got myself started. I browsed thru Kerri's shapes for a few minutes, and went with a few of the first things that I came across. Ever since seeing the cute little television that is part of The History Project class, I knew it would be perfect for documenting some of my favorite TV shows.

I decided to do a full 6x8 "layout" for one side of the spread. I cut the circle background (you know I LOVE my circle backgrounds) from Kerri's Life Additions: Backgrounds kit from white cardstock, and adhered it to a piece of white cardstock. I quickly noticed that there was some wiggle room in the 6x8" page protector, and it can actually hold a 6.25"x8.25" page, so I then matted the page on a piece of charcoal grey cardstock.

Kerri has a few different versions of the word "favorite", and I ended up using the one from the Just Because kit, cut from a scrap of red Crate Paper patterned paper. I used some tiny alpha stickers to finish the title.

I cut the TV out of a piece of chalkboard-ish patterned paper, and cut a scrap of a grey lined paper to tuck behind the screen. I almost left this page as is, without any other embellishments. I had it photographed and everything, and when I shared a sneak peek of it on Instagram, Kerri noticed that I had adhered the TV upside down. Lol. So after turning that cute little TV around, I ended up adding some enamel dots from Bella Blvd and an arrow sticker in the upper corner.

I just love the two inch pocket pages for the 6x8" albums. I knew it would be perfect for recording a lot of things in an all about me type album. I looked online to find logos for my favorite shows, making sure to find ones that could also be cropped into squares, knowing I would be using a divided page protector with 2" pockets.

I also looked for larger sized images, and really had to play around with different ones for each show. So many of the images out there are sized super small and aren't great for printing. I had several that I thought looked slightly blurry, but they all turned out pretty good. I guess it helps that the pictures are only two inches.

It was a pure coincidence that I managed to find so many photos with the same color scheme!

I have a TON of favorite shows, so I ended up adding in an additional divided page protector, and trimming off one row of photos, making it a 4x8" protector. I love the look of different sized pages mixed into these small albums, as it adds a little variety to things.

I still had a few more on my list that I needed to find logos/photos for, so I will be adding those to the backside of that smaller protector. This will allow me to document 28 favorite shows. I have way more than that, but I'm focusing on my main ones. Lol.

When I came across the "keep it real" cut in Kerri's Something to Say kit, it gave me the idea to record a few "real" tidbits about myself and my life. I think oftentimes, without intentionally trying, we can give off the illusion that our lives are a bit more perfect that they really are. So this was a chance to "keep it real" and write down a few things that others may not realize about me and/or my life.

I cut my title from some older Crate Paper patterned paper, as well as from white cardstock, so that I could layer them together. I sized it pretty large, so that it would fill up the majority of the 6x8" page. I can't even remember who makes that text patterned paper, but I cut it to 6x8" and the matted it onto a 6.25"x8.25" piece of black cardstock, so that it fit better in the page protector.

I cut out a few circles from some really old pink distressed Basic Grey patterned paper and machine stitched around them. I arranged them along the outside edges of the page, and trimmed off the excess.

I used another two inch pocket page for this spread as well, knowing that it would be a good way to add my different thoughts individually, as opposed to journaling them all together. I added in a few squares of coordinating patterned paper, so that the page wasn't all journaling and to break up the white cardstock squares.

If you get up close and really, really look, there are plenty of things about me that are "real", no matter how hard I try to come off like I have it all together. These were just some of the ones that came to mind when I sat down to journal. I'm sure that now that this is finished, I will think of some better ones!

Kerri was sweet enough to send me a few of her new stamp sets and they just happened to arrive in the mail the day I was finishing this page. So I worked two of her stamps from the One Fine Day stamp set, "seriously" and "oh me oh my", onto the page. They seemed to fit well. I'm pretty sure I didn't pick the right ink pad to use, since I was stamping them onto a coated sticker. But they're fine in my book, since I'm not an amazing stamper anyways!

 

Making Of A Band Mini Album: The Photos

Back to bloggin, back to blogging. So, what should I blog about first? How about the second part of the band mini album project that I believe I said I would share a full month ago? Geez. I specifically typed: "I thought I would do a few posts, spread out over the next week or two (or three, depending on how life goes), on the process of creating this project and getting it all assembled". I guess we know how life went for me the last month!

I talked about my supplies for this project in THIS POST, and today I thought I would share a bit about the photo process of the project. Which was kind of a huge process, and one that I'm still working on getting finished. I would guess that 98% of the photos I am including in this album came from Alyssa's iPod, older cell phone, and/or her iPhone. So the first step was waiting for her to have the time to get all of the photos together for me. I had her put everything on a flashdrive, so that I could easily transfer it all to my laptop.

Alyssa did have the majority of the photos seperated into folders for each year. She had very little for freshman year, a small amount for sophomore year, and tons of photos for junior and senior year. Then there were lots of random photos that we had to figure out which year they fell into. It's nice when you can hold your curser over a photo and it will give you the date the photo was taken. But that doesn't always happen when they're from cell phones, screenshotted from other friend's phones, etc. We did the best we could to figure out where everything went.

The next step was sorting out the photos within each year's folder. I knew I could pretty much group the majority of the photos into "events", which would make them easy to organize into the album. Like having all the photos from one concert together, all the photos from the football games together, etc. I created folders for each concert and/or event, and just started plopping photos into those folders. 

The next step was going into each event folder, and getting the photos ready to print. I ended up doing a little bit of editing on most of the photos. Not too much though. There were definately photos that I wish I could have worked more magic on (remember, a lot weren't the best quality), but they were what they were and I was ok with that. Once I had edited the photos, I moved the original photos into a new folder, just to get them out of the way.

Then it came time to figure out what sizes I wanted to print each photo. I knew that my photos would be either 4x6", 2x2", 3x3", 4x4", or 2x3" in size. For each event, I picked at least two photos that would make great 4x6's, and would look good on the opening and closing page of that event's section in the album. For events that had a large quantity of photos, I often choose even more 4x6" photos, but I knew from the start I wanted at least two of that size.

I tried to get a good look at how many photos I had for each event, how they could be cropped (would squares work, or would they have to be kept in full), and then determine what divided page protectors would hold them the best. From there, I would start cropping and getting them ready to print.

For each photo I was going to have printed, I named them with the year and the event name. So the photos in the screenshot above are labeled "SeniorYear_FallConcert_1", "SeniorYear_FallConcert_2", etc. This made it easy to sort them out after I picked up my photo order.

For the smaller sized photos, I cropped them and placed them onto 4x6" canvases, so that I could fit multiple photos together. I could put two 3x3's on a 4x6 photo, four 2x2's on a 4x6 photo (you can technically put six on there, but I found they were cutting a little bit off one side of my print, so I stuck with four), four 2x3's on a 4x6 photo, etc.

I even put my 4x4's on a 4x6 photo. I could have just printed them as 4x6", but by cropping them myself and sticking them onto the 4x6 canvas, I knew exactly where to trim them to get that 4x4" square. If that makes sense.

I had a folder within each event folder to plop my "to print" photos into. Once I had gotten all of the photos from an event ready to go, I simply signed into my Costco account and uploaded those photos into my "Band Album Project" album. Since I live about two miles from Costco, I would usually do an order each day, since it was easy enough to run and pick them up.

I really got into a good workflow while working on these photos, and I got pretty quick at deciding what size to print, cropping them, sticking them on canvases, etc. I could whip out events left and right. It's been a while since I've worked on this project (I blame summer!), so when I go back to finish these, I know it will take me a while to get in my groove again.

I'll share the next part of this project in the next week or so (don't sit around waiting for it, but it WILL be coming!), and I'll show you what I did with all of those photos once I picked them up and brought them home.

Making Of A Band Mini Album: The Supplies

I don't seem to have many projects to share lately, which means I haven't been blogging as much. It all seems to go hand-in-hand. It's like I need a finished project in order to blog. There is one project that I've been working on for a while though, and that's a mini album that I'm putting together containing all of Alyssa's band photos from her four years of high school. I thought I would do a few posts, spread out over the next week or two (or three, depending on how life goes), on the process of creating this project and getting it all assembled.

The first thing I thought I would share is the supplies. I choose to use a 6x8" Sn@p binder album from Simple Stories for this project. I love these albums. They're sturdier than a few other 6x8" albums that I've seen, I love the dividers that come inside, and they have a great mix of divided page protectors available to add in. I choose the green album, since our school color is green. A darker green, but this still works.

Now for the divided page protectors. I used all Simple Stories page protectors. I made sure to have at least one package of each configuration on hand when I started this project back in May. I quickly learned which were my favorites and which ones I didn't seem to use that often. I had to stock up on some of the designs that I was using the most of.

 

I used one of these two configurations for the start and end of each "section" in the album. More on the photos later, but I had basically seperated the years, and then seperated all of the events within each school year as well. So each time I was switching to a new event, or a new concert, I used one of these page protectors to start that section. I liked that I could highlight a favorite photo as a 4x6" photo, and then use one of the 2x3" pockets or a 4x6" pocket to add in the name and date of the event.  

 

These two configurations were also favorites to use. About 98% of the photos for this album all came from Alyssa's iPod, older cell phone, or her iPhone. And a huge majority of those photos worked well as squares. I thought I would use the full sheet of 2x2" pockets more than I actually did use it. I mainly ended up using that configuration for the photos from the football games and marching band, since I had SO many photos to fit in.

   

These were also configurations that I used quite a bit. I loved that the first one has all square spots as well, and I actually ended up cutting that page protector down a few times, and just using the two 4x4" pockets. Kind of fun to have a different sized page protector mixed in here and there. I ended up printing just a few photos as 6x8" prints, but I also used this second page protector to hold a sheet of paper with horizontal photos adhered down.

   

These three configurations hardly got used. I thought for sure I would use the third one more, with the four 3x4" pockets, but turns out that all of the photos that I wanted to print as 3x4" prints were horizontal, and not vertical.

And that, my friends, was the biggest issue I ran into with these divided page protectors. Not having very many options for incorporating horizontal photos, other than the 4x6" size, was very limiting. A huge majority of Alyssa's photos were all horizontal, and while a lot of them could be easily cropped into squares, a lot of them could not. I hardly came across any vertical photos, otherwise, it would have made things a lot easier. My main option on the horizontal photos was to print them as 2x3's, and put them into the square pockets, leaving room to fill with patterned paper or something. Which is fine, and easy enough to do. But not as easy as if they could fit perfectly into a pocket.

  

I also had some digital templates that I thought I would incorporate into the album. I had come across the Quick Fix 6x8 Templates over at Pixels & Company quite a while ago, and knew it would be perfect for using in these albums. I can't find that item in their store at all anymore, or I would link you to it.

But you all know I love Kerri Bradford's storyboard templates. With this project in mind, I had put in a request for some 6x8 templates, and Kerri whipped up the Half Pints #1 kit. I feel bad that I never put them to use in this project. But I have another album that I'd like to do at some point, and I will definitely put those to good use.

I'll be back in a few days to share the process of collecting, organizing, and printing four years worth of photos!

Digital Book Share

Sorry it's been so quiet around here. We're in that last week before Christmas, and I'm far from being ready. My girls have half days at school this week for finals, before getting a two week break. Which means I have extra kiddos here during the day, with school being out. Last weekend, we started our winter soccer league, which keeps our Saturdays busy. And to top it off, it's CHA time, which means I'm spending a lot of time doing general CHA planning, and will be creating projects as soon as the new product shows up on my doorstep. Yep. Just a little busy around here.

I thought I would quickly share my digital book that I blogged about HERE, as it arrived about a week ago. It took barely a week to come, and I couldn't wait to open it up. I think it turned out great I did second guess myself a bit, wondering if I should have upgraded the paper. I can't even remember how much extra the other two paper options were, but it might be worth checking into next time.

What I love the most about this book, is that at 163 pages, it's so nice and compact. It's not even as thick as a roll of my Bella Blvd designer tape. If you saw the other post, and that huge stack of albums, it'll show you how much shelf space I'm saving my combining all of those layouts into this one digital book.

I won't bore you with photos of every page in the book. Because honestly, all of the layouts are right here on my blog and in my galleries. But I thought I would just share a handful of pages, just to give you an idea of how it all turned out. And excuse the awesome glare on the left side of the photos. I obviously didn't take too much time taking these photos, or I would have ended up with some better ones to share.

So far, I've only handed out one stack of layouts to one previous daycare family. I've been too busy to track people down, and I don't think ahead enough to take them with me if I'm driving by one of their houses. Eventually, I will get them all handed out, so they can enjoy them.

Turning Layouts Into A Book

"What do you do with the layouts you make of your daycare kids?". That's a question that I've been asked a lot over the years. And my answer has always been the same. I keep the layouts. Sure, I show them off to the parents. But they are layouts with photos that I've taken, stories and/or journaling about what happens when these kids are with me, and they are memories of the time that I spend with these kids. I hope this doesn't sound too selfish, but they are MY memories of MY days with them.

I was searching my blog for something last week and came across this photo from many years ago. At that time, I had accumulated 5 full albums of layouts about my daycare kids from over the years. I believe shortly after this was when I sorted through the layouts and did actually give some away to a handful of the parents. Just a little narrowing down, you could say.

{consider yourself warned: these are ALL cell phone camera pics, and I'm not lucky enough to have a really nice cell phone}

As of two weekends ago, this was what my collection of daycare layouts looked like. I still only had 5 full 12x12 albums, although there were some being stored in a 6th album as well (and notice I had changed my album style at some point). I also had 2 full 9x9 albums, since several years ago I was scrapping a ton of layouts in that size.

This was the massive pile of layouts that I sorted out and put away in albums two weekend ago. There were close to 80 layouts in that pile. I don't scrap the daycare kids as much as I used to, for a few reasons, but I did have about 10-15 layouts in there to add to the daycare albums. And they wouldn't fit. Which got me thinking once again about an idea I had the last time I was putting layouts away, earlier this year.

A while back, I pondered the idea of taking all of those layouts and turning them into a digital book. And then passing the layouts themselves along to any parents that I'm still in touch with. I felt like it was a huge decision. Having pictures of layouts in a book is kind of like seeing layouts online, on blogs, or eve in magazines. It's cool. But it's nothing like seeing layouts in person, where you can appreciate the details, layers, textures, etc. 

But at the same time, I was thinking of the space these albums are taking on my shelves. Have I mentioned that I have over 60 albums??? It's one thing to have that many albums of my own family. But when I think about having 7 albums of just the daycare kids, I have to wonder how important they'll be 10 years from now, 20 years from now. When I think about it like that, I actually like the idea of having one compact book that features all of the layouts in one spot.

I have done quite a few books thru Shutterfly and Blurb, and love them all.

I've done several blog books, which is basically turning an entire years worth of blog posts (text and photos) into a nice compact book (SEEN HERE).

Three different years, I created a photo book of just the daycare kids, summing up their year in just a few photos of each child (usually done using a free photo book code, and one of them can be SEEN HERE).

And I also created a book for a daycare girlie that had been with me for 3.5 years, and included tons of photos along with all the layouts I've created of her (SEEN HERE).

Once I made the decision to actually do this, I started by pulling layouts out of their albums. I made it through about 2 albums before I became completely overwhelmed and thought about turning back. Luckily, that passed and I continued on. I already had all of my layouts organized by child (or family, if I had watched siblings) within the albums, so it was easy to pull out each child/family and make a pile for each. I worked with everything from 2001-2011. It was a good cut off point, since the kids that have been here the last 2 years are still super current in our life.

I then took photos of each and every layout. I actually have photos of all of my layouts, but they're resized for the blog, and for the books you need the massively huge image files. I would take each set of layouts, one child/family at a time, and photograph the layouts in order. I didn't stress too much about this part, as I only took about 3-4 shots of each layout (normally, when I photograph layouts I take at leat 10-12 photos). Then I would move on to the next child/family.

I would upload them to my laptop in batches, pick the best shot of each layout and then do some very quick editing. Most of them just needed a little lightening up, and maybe a slight color adjustment. I cropped them all, sharpened, and saved. I created a folder for each child/family, so I could keep them all seperate and easier to work with.

I knew I would use Blurb to create my book. It's easy to use, and the prices are really reasonable. I also knew that I wanted to make a 12x12" book, so that the layouts were just like their original size (instead of going with a 7x7" book, as I have used before). I kept things super simple, with one layout on each page, leaving a page inbetween each child/family to use as a divider. And since I named my images with the child/family name + the number for what order they went in, it took me NO time at all to load all of the images into the book in perfect order.

For the divider pages, I basically created a digital title page in Photoshop, that I could then upload as an image. I have a HUGE collection of digital products, so I just pulled in some patterned papers, a notebook page (in several colors), some tapes (in several colors), and staples. Once I had the page set up, it was super easy to just swap out the elements to match whoever the page was for. The beauty of digital!

 

The longest and hardest part of this project was trying to upload the finished book for ordering. It didn't help that I was trying to get in on an awesome sale, which apparently a TON of other people were trying to get in on as well. They actually extended the sale a day, because so many weren't able to upload their books.

After a lot of persistance on my part, and some magic on Blurb's part, I finally got my book all uploaded an ordered. Soon, I will have a 163 page 12x12" hardbound book in my hands, that won't take up much space on my shelves.

I did end up with a pile of layouts that I can't part with. A lot of those are layouts that include a bunch of the kids together, as I have created a lot of those over the years expressing how much they mean to me. I'm keeping layouts that included my girls, as a lot of the previous kids became their best friends. I'm keeping the layouts that document my typical work day, and the things we do here together. But any layouts that were strickly about the individual kids are being passed along to parents that I'm still in touch with (which is about 70%).

It gave me a good reason to use up some really old post bound albums that have been taking up space on my shelves. I made up albums for each child/family that had a good amount of layouts. A few are just in a bag to pass along. And for those that I'm not in touch with anymore? I'm not sure you want to hear what I did with those layouts. Are you sitting down? I threw them away. Yes, I know that's pretty drastic. But I was 100% fine with it, and had no regrets after doing it. 

I love creating layouts and cards, and doing everyday scrapping. But honestly, I love when I have some free time from assignments to work on fun projects like this. I feel like I accomplished something big, and it feels really, really good.

October Afternoon: September Guest Designer Part 3

Last Friday, my last project went up on the October Afternoon blog, as their September guest designer. I really went back and forth with myself on this project. I really wanted to use the Milk Money mini collection, along with the fun 6x8 album. But I have designated school albums for both my girls that I started years and years ago, so I knew that I really didn't have a need to put together any sort of actual school mini album. I knew I could make it work for something though.

I've been teaching at Creating Keepsakes University this year, otherwise known as CKU. The event definitely has a "school" type theme to it, so I thought I could make the Milk Money collection work with a few photos I've collected along the way. I quickly realized that I haven't been taking many photos at these events, so I'm hoping to snap quite a few more photos at the last CKU in October to finish out the album. This is definitely a work in progress.

I printed out whatever photos I could find, many of which came straight from my Instagram and some even borrowed from other teachers at the event, dug out one of my badges, and started pulling out all of the journaling cards and accent cards that I thought would tie in nicely with my photos and the event. I thought the little graduate girl was really cute, and it ties in since the students "graduate" on the last night of the event.

Very rarely do I ever use my own handwriting for my journaling, but I was trying to save myself some time and decided to put pen to paper. I was reminded very quickly why I don't like to use my own handwriting, as I didn't think about what I wanted to say before I started writing and I made plenty of mistakes. I always journal better when I take my time and type it up, plus I can fit more since I tend to write a little big. The "Pick me!!!" card reminded me of the giveaways that we do in the classes. Everyone loves when it's giveaway time and I pull out the little papers with their names on them to draw from.

I thought the "What's for lunch" card was super cute. But I could only find one photo of food from the events, and it wasn't the best representation of the meals that were provided for the teachers. I really need to get a photo of the bacon at the next show, since I do believe that's our favorite part. Tons of bacon every morning. Loved it! But that's the beauty of a work in progress. I can get a few more photos when I go in a few weeks and add them right in here or even swap them out.

There's a story that goes with this last group photo, and the "remember that time" card was a perfect match to go with it. That story isn't quite one to share with everyone in the class though, so I will be adding that in later! I included those last four photos that I snapped while traveling to the last show. That's when I tend to take the most photos. Not at the event, during the event, or in classes, since everything is always so hectic and busy. No, I take them while I'm traveling, since I have way too much down time than I know what to do with.

 I want to give a huge "Thanks" to October Afternoon for inviting me to be their guest designer for September! I have loved working with their new Daily Flash collections, and I already have some more ideas floating around in my head with everything I have left!

High School Sports Album

I have an album project to share today that I spent the last week working on. It's also up over at Kerri Bradford Studio, since I used so many of her Silhouette designs throughout the album.

I recently got a call from a previous daycare parent, asking if I could do take on a sidejob for a friend of his. His friend was looking to put together an album as a graduation gift for his daughter who was graduating from high school last week. I remember talking to both of them, and hearing them both ask "is this something you do?". My first thought (in my head, of course) was "not really", since I don't often put together projects for other people.

But there were a few reasons that I couldn't say "no" to taking on this big project. The previous daycare parent that first asked was one of my absolute favorite familes to work with. If I had a third daughter, Amanda would be her name (their daugher). This graduating senior went to the same high school that Alyssa goes too, and they also went to the same elementary school. Alyssa and this senior played on the varsity soccer team together this past year, and I've watched this senior play in previous years while waiting for the junior varsity games to play. And this senior's dad had saved all of the newspaper clippings from her high school sports years and wanted to do something special with them, and I think that is pretty cool!

This album is almost all newspaper clippings from her years on the high school soccer team and volleyball team. There were only a few photos from "Senior Night" that he wanted to include. These were taken at the last soccer game of the year, where the seniors are recognized and walked out by their familes for their last game. This album is also ALL cardstock and patterned paper. No embellishments or bulky items of any kind. This helped keep the cost down for the parents.

 

Luckily, her dad was great about keeping all of the newpaper clippings organized by year, from freshman year through senior year. I simply went through and put them in order within each year, and trimmed up the chippings a bit more so they were all nice and neat. 

I had decided on using lots of my favorite white grid patterned paper from Bella Blvd for the background pages. It's a great neutral background paper, and I happen to have a ton of it on hand. I lightly misted each grid paper with some tan misting spray. I also used kraft, green, and black cardstock for my background pages as well. Our school colors are green and black (or maybe it's technically green and white), and I wanted to stick with that color theme.

 

When I was laying out the newspaper clippings to get an idea of how many pages I would need, I got a good sense of how they would fit together on the pages. I decided to mix in some 6"x12" pages and some 8.5"x11" pages, as I keep those size page protectors on hand. In the end, I even ended up creating a few custom page protectors (using my sewing machine and then cutting them down to size), for 9"x12" pages, 10"x12" pages, etc.

I made four piles, one for each year of high school, and worked with those four seperate piles through out the entire process of working on this album.

I started by adhering all of the newspaper clippings to my background papers. I stuck with a sheet of white grid patterned paper on the left side of each spread, and then alternated using black, green, and kraft cardstock on the right side of the spreads.

I knew that the decision on where to place the newspaper clippings on each page would really be based off how they fit together, since most had 2 parts to each article (they're almost always continued on another page of the newspaper). I wasn't taking titles or accents into consideration at all at this point. Just adhering the clippings however they looked good on the page. 

I then went through all of Kerri's kits, as well as my Silhouette library, pulling out any shapes (soccer ball, volley ball, and some stars), words, and phrases that I thought would fit in with the sports theme of the album. I created a folder in my Silhouette library for this project and dumped everything in there to work from.

Kerri's new Weathered Door Alphabet kit came at just the right time, as I was short on sports words and had planned on creating some of my own. I have to admit that I have never used regular fonts to make my own words. I love having things done for me, so I was glad to have this new kit to work with. I just love the chunkier font and slightly distressed look of the Weathered Door Alphas, and they have just the right look I was going for.

After collecting an assortment of shapes, I went page by page and choose words and phrases that fit in the space I had on that particular page. I set up four different sheets to work with in the Silhouette software: grid paper, black cardstock, green cardstock, and kraft cardstock. I knew that all of my cutting would be on those four papers.

As I chose a word or phrase, I would place in on the color I wanted to cut it from and size it to fit the space on the album page. I also kept notes (most of the time!) as to what cut went on what page, so that after I ran all four of the pages through my Cameo, I would know what shapes went where. Because believe me, it got really confusing.

Kerri's School Years: Add Ons kit came in really handy for the divider pages, to seperate the years in the album. I made the "freshman year", "sophomore year", "junior year", and "senior year" really big so that it filled up the page really well. I also cut out the actual years that that particular school year covered, by using the Decade 2000, twentyTEN, twentyELEVEN, twentyTWELVE, twentyTHIRTEEN kits. 

I also used shapes from Kerri's Touchdown kit, The Ol' Ballgame kit, A Beautiful World kit, and her Graduation kit. I had shapes and phrases picked out from other kits as well, but didn't end up using them, most likely because they didn't fit the spaces I was working with.

Once I had my phrases and words down, I started adding in small strips of patterned paper. I stuck with just a few patterns from the Making The Team collection from Bella Blvd. I didn't want to make it too complicated, so I chose a few patterns to work with, and used just those and small strips of cardstock as well. I also took out just one border punch, and used that here and there on some of the strips.

I did sneak in some pink patterned paper, but only on 2 spreads in the album. This was for our "Kicking For A Cure" event, which our girls soccer team does each year to support cancer patients and research. The players all wear pink jerseys, and they paint a huge pink ribbon on the field. I thought it was a nice touch to add some pink in for those articles.

My only "embellishments" were the soccer balls, volley balls, and stars. I cut a ton of these shapes from all four of the main papers, and sprinkled them in throughout the album. I ended up cutting some small stars from a sheet of yellow star patterned paper, just to add a touch of additional color.

In the end, I think it ended up being 64 pages, or 32 front and back. That includes the handful of 6x12" pages, and 8.5x11" pages that were mixed in.

I was really happy with how this turned out. The parents were super happy with how it turned out. I don't think they really had any idea that this is the direction I was taking with it, and I love that it was such a fun surprise for them. And I hear that the graduating senior really loved the album as well.

Working on this project has me really wanting to make the time to get Alyssa and Sarah's school albums caught up. And maybe even tackle the 11 years of soccer photos that have piled up!

soccer albums: slice all star design card

i got to play with the new all star design card for the slice, today. it's perfect for all sports, and has lots of great shapes to work with. right away, i knew i wanted to do something for my girls soccer albums. yes, i have soccer albums. i came up with a plan about 6 months ago, and started getting them all organized. one thing that i knew was on my list to do, was to make divider pages, to seperate all the years.

 

i knew my divider page would serve as a sort of intro page for each soccer season in the albums. i got the idea to use THESE page protectors late last night, right as i climbed into bed. luckily, i remembered the idea this morning. the middle section is 6x12.5 or so. it's a bit longer than 12 inches, since all the squares on the top and bottom are 3 inches in size. so there's some extra wiggle room in the large center area. i knew i would add their age division, and team name, to that large part of the page. and then use squares of cardstock and pattern paper in the other spaces.

 

i have a ton of this white grid pattern paper, so i figured it would work good for these pages. i have 18 teams to do, between the two girls. since this area is longer than 12 inches, i just added a few strips of kraft cardstock and pattern paper to the left side, to make the strip a bit longer. i love the font on the all star design card. i decided to do a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters for the team name. partly because some of the team names are pretty long. these letters are all either 2 inches or 2.5 inches in size. for the age division, i sliced the "U" and the number in a 3 inch size.

 

this is a soccer album. so there should be some soccer balls, right?

 

here's what it looks like finished, and in the album. this is for alyssa's last soccer season. her last year on under-14's. i added her jersey number, which was #5, to one of the squares. i will be adding the year as well, to the bottom white grid paper. need to find some stickers for that, i think. 

 

now, pretend this intro page was for sarah's album. because i havn't printed the photos from alyssa's arsenal season yet. but sarah just happened to be on the arsenal team the previous year, so this page could easily be her's too. just to give you an idea of what i have going in their albums. this is what i set up last year. i have some 8.5x11 page protectors, that i slipped their team photo and individual photo into. i also have their game schedule, and any newspaper clippings in there. at some point, i will do something with those, and make them a little neater. but for now, it makes sure i have them in the right spot and they're not floating around the house.

 

following that, i have THESE page protectors. i simply choose an assortment of my favorite photos from the season to print, and i slip them into these protectors. i don't stress if i have vertical photos. it doesn't bother me that they're sideways on the page. although, they do make divided page protectors that will hold a mix of vertical and horizontal, if it really bothered you.

 

i honestly don't scrap many soccer photos, on actual layouts. although, i do have a really fun one that will be in an upcoming CK issue ;) when you're dealing with 8 years of soccer, and 18 different teams, that's a lot of soccer photos. and i can't come up with that many ideas for layouts. lol! the photos are in an album. and if i get some notion to scrap a layout, i can simply pull out some photos and scrap them. i do have a few layouts done, and they're slipped right into the album, behind the divided page protectors, for the right season.

 

here's sarah's into page for her all-star team, that just finished up this past march.

 

this is the first one i did this morning, and you can see that "revolution" is a much longer team name. which is why i switched out some letters to lowercase. i like the loopy letter stickers that i used for "all stars", and it makes me want to add a little sub-title to my other intro pages.

 

when i went upstairs to check on her jersey number, i realized their jerseys were blue, but with touches of red. i should have added red as an accent color, instead of green. i choose green, because of all the grass you see on the field and in the photos. although this pattern paper does have stars on it, and this was for her "all star" team. i didn't really do that intentionally, but it's fitting :)

 

and here's what this page looks like in the album. so i have two intro pages down, and 16 to go. totally do-able, right? lol! honestly, yes, it IS do-able. these can be mass produced. especially, if i'm cutting everything from black cardstock. i'm not about re-inventing the wheel, when it comes to certain things. and albums like this (or my school albums, vacation albums) are meant to be easy and simple. so i will be keeping this design, all throughout both the girls albums. i can sit and cut a ton of soccer balls one night. or do all the age divisions one night. and the team names another night. cut all the papers one night. and then piece it all together. easy peasy, right :) 

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