Ivar's baby book

Yesterday I wrote about our Family Album. The plan for the Family Albums is that I will not make multiple albums for multiple children. Rather our kids, if they ever care to, can take those albums and scan or make copies of whatever pictures they want. But a baby has got to have a baby book. I found this Eric Carle baby journal at Barnes and Noble and loved it for its bright colors and tons of blank pages for special pictures. All of these pictures are duplicates from the Family Album, but these pictures pertain specifically to the topics listed in the journaling questions on the pages in between. And even though there are proper spaces for each picture, it is becoming more of a "scrapbook" on other pages...in the front cover I mounted my favorite pregnancy cards, in the back cover I mounted Ivar's baptism and dedication certificates. And on any empty area in between I have stuck in other special mementos: the napkin from Ivar's restaurant in Seattle sent from Uncle Ben and Aunt Jeanette, a picture of Ivar drawn by his cousin Mara, a little note my grandma included in with her gift. It's all in the pages of this book.

And now all that's left is the journaling. Heaven help me. That is an overwhelming task! I think I'm going to take a page a day. And I also plan on printing a lot of my blog posts and maybe add those in an envelope in front so that those stories are included within the pages of the baby book.

My final goal with this baby book is that it stays out and is read with dirty fingers by an excited little boy. I mean, not super dirty fingers, and not a super little boy, but that one day (after his ripping pages stage) Ivar can enjoy this book throughout his childhood.

week in the life: day one!

Today was my first day of Week in the Life, and I'm excited. I started a day early, because next weekend we'll be out of town and I wanted to get pics of our church community in this album. So I brought my camera to church and got some fun pictures and have been looking for the ordinary all day long. I went to Archivers yesterday with some birthday money from Mom and Dad Groves and got this album and the picture dividers seen below. (Thanks so much!) My mom gave me the scrapbook paper at Christmas, and I am so excited by how they coordinate! I didn't plan that one!

These are the divider pockets, so that I can keep receipts, daily to-do's or anything else that seems appropriate to display along with all of the pictures I am taking. Ali Edwards showed these on her blog on Friday and I was so giddy to find them in the store and try this style myself.

So much of this project is just me trying something new. I know I'm not a master photographer, and I don't have the cute kid pics to fill my pages. It might just be filled with food and Toonces, but that's okay, I suppose. This is our life right now, and that is what I'm really trying to capture.

documenting seven ordinary days

For years now I have been following Ali Edwards, guru of simple, storytelling scrapbooking. Somehow she makes it all seem less complicated, more doable, and every time her layouts are stunning and relatively uncluttered.

Every year she chooses one week, seven full days, to document the every day happenings in their family. Our scrapbooks often highlight the highs of the year...trips, holidays, special occasions, and this is all great. But in between those highlights are a whole lot more ordinary days that actually are a more accurate depiction of our life.

I've observed this week for three years now, simply by doing that: observing Ali as she does this project. But behold! Something has come over me this year, and I'm in. I didn't participate the past few years because I thought since we don't have kids, there wouldn't really be a whole lot to document in terms of actual things happening. But looking back, had I started this project, I'd have a week of our "normal" life while we lived in Montana, our "normal" when we lived in Minnesota and our "normal" last year in Nebraska. And I'm already bummed I didn't jump on this wagon earlier.

So this year, I'm grabbing my camera and will take pictures of the ordinary: my daily bowl of raisin nut bran that gets me started each day, my husband picking away at his laptop, my work, our church, and all the other ordinary things that given a bit of time and perspective, won't all seem so ordinary.

All of the details can be found here...it's a lot of digging around to get a feel, but at its core, it's creating a scrapbook of ordinary life, grocery shopping receipts, to-do lists and I'm excited to get started.

Anybody want to do this with me?!! It begins Monday April 19th.

simple, personal scrapbooks

My mom lives far from her five grandchildren. My brother lives in Seattle, my sister in Kalispell, Montana and Mom and Dad live in Minnesota. But they do lots of traveling to stay in their lives and for every trip she takes to Seattle or Montana and for every time the grandkids come to Minnesota, she makes an individual special book to give to each grandchild.

Mom will go through all of her pictures and make each grandchild a simple scrapbook filled with pictures from their time together. It's a commitment to pick the pictures and to get them all developed. But the whole concept is simple...and because she's been so consistent, every grandchild has dozens and dozens of these personal books on their bookshelves, filled with pictures of themselves having special moments with the cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents who they don't get to see super often.

For me, this is memory keeping at its best. The kids adore these special books, and all the while our long distance family is frequently reinforced as they see the pictures of all of us loving each other well.

So the scrapbooking lesson: keep it simple and keep it consistent. Well done, Mom.

And now...be sure to check out Mom's blog today and see her AMAZING flower on Annika's Frenchy Bag. So stinkin cute.

reunion album complete!

I had posted the first two pages of this album here, explaining Grandma's birthday party and how amazing this family reunion was. And, since posting those pictures, Grandma has been talking seriously about planning her next birthday party. I can't wait!

This is a completely different way to scrapbook. It is more art than story. The pictures are stunning and I loved decorating them. But the wordy girl in me was dying not to journal on each page. With the pages so skinny, a lot of text quickly ate up the layout. So I gave up trying and finally settled into just playing with ribbon and flowers and buttons. It was so different and it was so fun to experiment and play.

I think it is really good to challenge myself creatively like this. I have a pretty standard way that I scrapbook, with lots of layered paper, borders and a few embellishments. But this was totally new...to use ribbon and make everything three dimensional..to use some sequence and fabric and glue was just good and helped me get out of my creative box.

I still wanted to get the story of the week told within the album, so in the end I wrote out one long journal post and printed it out for the last page.

I love how this album turned out and now I have lots of ideas for how to incorporate these new techniques into other projects and handmade albums. I tell you what. That Donna Downey is pretty amazing and I am so grateful for her style and example while playing with ribbon, flowers, fabric and ink. So stinkin fun.

family reunion album

A classmate from my Donna Downey class took this picture below. And when I got it I remembered that after posting the canvas art class, I never reported on the second class!


This class was called Bloom, and out goal was to make a handmade album by the end of class. You can read more about this class on her website found here. Oh, actually, you can't. I think this class just got replaced with her apron class so there is nothing about it on her site anymore....

Anyway, our supply list said that we should bring 17 pictures that are two inches by three inches. When I went to find 17 pictures to document, I decided to focus on my Grandma's birthday party that she celebrated for a week at our family bible camp. She foot the bill for all of her descendants to attend (over 100 people!) and told everyone, "I don't care if you can make it to my funeral. But I do care that you come to my birthday party."

When it came time to plan her party, we got the ball rolling quickly, even though her 90th birthday was still two years off. She got very excited as we planned the week together and thought two years was too long to wait, so the reunion party was moved up a year and therefore renamed 'Grandma's 90-1 party' All of our reunion t-shirts had a logo with 90-1 on it.

She ordered four dairy queen ice cream cakes for the party and chose the theme, "Great is Thy Faithfulness' for our week together. The whole week was a fabulous celebration of God's faithfulness to our family. It is for this reason that I LOVE scrapbooking: This party was in 2007 and three years later, I am soaking up every picture, reliving every memory and feeling the faithfulness of God, celebrated in the life of one woman, all over again.

Donna's class was full of new techniques to try. We made our album from scratch, something I have never done before. This album was made out of cut cardboard, cut in staggered sizes with a box cutter, and each page was covered with paper or fabric, punched with holes holes and binded with binder rings.

This book is still in process, but my weekend plan is to finish it...I'll keep you posted!

8 years later!!!

I was in India studying abroad eight years ago and I am proud to announce that I JUST FINISHED THE SCRAPBOOK!!! Literally, it has been a work in progress for 8 years and finally I just sat down with the last stack of pictures, and slapped them on the last pages. And it is done!

It is amazing how little I remember from many of the pictures. I think this is why it is so important to write down the details right away, because the little things like the names of towns we traveled to are completely gone from my memory now.

So now, with this album complete, my next big giterdone project is my Wedding Preparation album...all the showers, planning, decoration dreaming and dress shopping. And since this album is just from four years ago, I'm cutting my scrapbook-behind-time in half!