My oldest child graduating from high school lit a fire under my scrapbooking butt like nothing I'd ever felt before! Last September, I realized that I had scrapbooks full of her layouts, but there were huge chunks of 3 and 5 years missing. And I really wanted to display her layouts at her graduation party.
It would have been easier to throw a bunch of photos into a slideshow. And most of my friends make slideshows of their kids' lives to play at graduation parties, but I didn't want to go that route. I wanted more. We're a book nerd family. We read and read and read. And I love to look at other people's photos very much, but I want to know the STORIES that make up their lives, not just look at pretty photos. So that's what I wanted for Emily.
I knew it would be a big job and take a lot of time, so I broke it down into monthly goals. But I didn't even know where to start so the first step was to go through what I had.
I had these two albums filled with layouts I'd done since she was seven.
I also went through all of my older albums shoved in the corner of our home library and realized I had two other albums that were just hers. Take a look at the wonder that it is her kindergarten album! LOL!
On the page below, I managed to incorporate the one 3x4 photo I had from the church directory, as well as her artwork, metal, rub-ons, alpha stickers, a double-matted photo, torn paper, ribbons, tags, Bazzill cardstock, my handwriting, and my child's handwriting. I'm not sure there was a trend that year that wasn't included. I was winning, eh?
And then there is this album - it came complete with matching letter stickers to make the title for the front cover. The layouts in here were apparently not worthy of being in the other albums. Or something. I'm really not sure why I had them separated.
And then I had all these photo albums and boxes that were full of photos that hadn't been scrapbooked at all.
I also went through my Project Life albums. I've been doing Project Life since 2012 so I knew there were some layouts that focused primarily on her. All of the kids had weeks where their individual activities were my focal point.
Her 17th birthday was a good example. She had a friend party and a family party so that's all I put in this layout. The beauty of digital is that I could simply make a copy of this layout and put it in her album and it was done! So I went through and pulled out all of those that I could copy and ended up with 5 or 6.
At this point, I could set a goal. I knew I had nothing of her first five years scrapbooked and nothing since her freshman year, except a couple of random Project Life layouts. So my goal was simple. I wanted to have at least 3-4 layouts of every year of her life to put into albums for her graduation party. I had a minimum of 30-40 layouts to make and eight months to do it in. It seems easy, but when you factor in real life, it turned into a daunting task.
To be continued.....
