Thanksgiving is almost upon us, and here's a quick album idea for recording thoughts of gratitude while documenting the growth of our children. Last year, my children selected a piece of cardstock (hence the bright pink and yellow), and I traced their hands and recorded what they were thankful for. I had intended to use these on a traditional layout, but they were filed away and in the chaos of the ensuing season, I forgot all about them. When I found them a few months ago, the idea struck to make an album to hold each year's tracings.
I started with the Teresa Collins' Bind It All shaped chipboard covers. I covered mine in papers from 7Gypsies and a sheet of handmade paper on the front (love that!), but you can skip this step, and save some time, if you choose her colored covers. I am still mask crazy, but this time I used a Heidi Swap mask as a template for an applique. I simply stuck the bird mask on a piece of deep brown paper, cut around it, then removed the mask. Voila! Instant embellishment! I applied the branch to the cover paper, lightly swiped around it with a dauber, then filled in the resulting branch shape with glass glitter. I applied Matte Accents over the glitter, to protect fingers from the sharp glass glitter. When that was dry, I used a little brown oil pastel to define the edges of the branch. The "n" in the text was made from grungeboard and distress embossing powder. A little gold Stickles and ink finished it off.
For the inside, I cut out their hand tracings and glued them on cardstock. I decided to leave those pages as is, as not to distract from the size of their sweet little hands. I added some patterned paper pages for Thanksgiving photos, and two altered file folders to hold drawings ( I like to add their artwork whenever I can). I will probably open the bindings and add more files and pages through the years, but with the spiral binding, that's easy to do.
There are so many great products to play with, but what will really matter to your family are the memories you recorded, not the paper you chose or the rub-ons you used. Make a simple album and record those memories before they slip away. You will be glad you did!
Casey
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