Last September, I started working on finishing Emily's scrapbooks – a project that has me so excited that I've dubbed it My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever. And what was going to be one simple blog post about it has now turned into three! You can click on these links if you want to go back to the beginning:
My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever and Starting My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever
But what does "finishing" mean, you might ask? I'm a pretty independent scrapbooker and I don't really care about trends, or scrapbooking chronologically, or following anyone else's set of rules. So I chose not to even look at anyone else's albums or Pinterest pins about albums. I just knew that for me, "finished" simply meant having some layouts about her life's events from birth to high school graduation done and in albums. Obviously, there's a lot that wasn't going to get scrapbooked and I'm totally okay with that. But I wanted to highlight some things from every year for her.
Besides figuring out that I needed to make pages from birth to age seven, and then sophomore through senior year, I also needed to decide how to make them. I've been a digi scrapper for the past nine years so that was my first thought, but I have albums and boxes of photos already printed from her early years. And then I have her high school years all on my phone or my computer.
So I decided to do whatever was easiest with each set of photos – I made traditional layouts with the printed photos and digi layouts with the digital photos. And along the lines of doing what was easiest, for each type of layout, I made myself stick with just a few designs and colors and products and keep them very, very simple.
Without much more chatter, here's what I did for her early years. I pulled out all of her baby and preschool albums.
A lot of Anne Geddes peeking babies on my albums. LOL.
I went through the albums and photo boxes and marked the photos that I wanted to scrapbook with sticky notes.
And then I decided to use white cardstock for everything. And please don't judge me based on the quality of these layout photos. I never, ever recommend photographing layouts still in the page protectors or with this much glare. But it was the fastest way to finally finish this blog post, so bad photos are what I'm using. 😉
The only supplies I used were Ali Edwards' Story Kits (still my favorite subscription EVER!!!),
Project Life supplies left over from my year on the Creative Team, and
a few kitschy baby stickers and embellishments that I couldn't resist.
And then I just started putting together layouts. I used the same 3-4 designs over and over again, depending on how many photos I wanted to include.
I probably made about 40 paper layouts and, if it hadn't been for a local friend who kept me on track, I probably wouldn't have finished. The key was the pre-planning and reserving our time for each other. She and I planned a couple of days every month that we would set aside only for scrapbooking. On average, we scrapbooked 4-5 hours/day twice/month. And it was so incredibly helpful to have that time set aside for this project.
For the rest of Emily's high school years, I stuck with some of my favorite digital templates. Most of them are Lynn Grieveson's templates – she used to be at Designer Digitals, but she's now here. I also used a few simple embellishments and templates from Designer Digitals – all older supplies that I had from being on their Design Team for seven years.
I already had Emily's freshman year done so I started with her academic teams and added in some of her birthday parties and senior year activities. Here's a few digi layouts from those years:
I made four two-page layouts for the GAPP program but this is the first page. When Emily gets home from Germany, she wants to make a 6×8 Project Life album about her trip so those will be separate.
This is one of my favorite layouts – simply because it chronicles an incredible day in her life. If you're not friends with me on Facebook, you probably haven't heard this story. A few weeks before graduation, Emily was pulled out of class and asked if she wanted to meet and possibly interview Hillary Clinton on a campaign stop in town. Emily is a HUGE political junkie and she was over-the-moon excited and nervous. She had two hours to prepare! I raced a suit and some makeup to school for her because she was going to be the on-camera anchor for her school news, not to mention interview a former First Lady! The day turned out to be an enormous success and, as it turns out, Emily was the ONLY local reporter to speak to Secretary Clinton! She beat out all the local reporters. LOL! And the local reporters took note. She was interviewed by all three local TV stations, did a live radio interview, and a photo of her meeting Secretary Clinton was the lead story and front page of the newspaper.
And that's where I ended her albums before her graduation party! So I still have 3-4 layouts to include about graduation and her party, but other than those, her albums are FINISHED. In all caps. FINISHED.
And that's why it's My Most Successful Scrapbooking Project Ever. Because it's done. :)
Of course, I plan on making a whole lot more layouts about her and I'll keep putting them in albums but she won't be living with us full-time anymore so it will be different and I won't be there to document her day-to-day life.
And shhhhhh……if I have my way, I'll convert her to scrapbooking and she can start creating her own albums. 😉
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