Scouts and School

It seems like I am getting short bursts of scrapping energy. One day last week, I managed to churn out six pages! It does help when you duplicate previous pages and keep things simple otherwise. Caleb's Cub Scout album is "caught up," in that all the photos I had printed are scrapped. Of course, that only takes me to January of this year, but it does make it the most current album I'm working on. I am slowly trying to make progress on the boys' regular albums. They are both now a year behind, which is better than the two years behind my album is.

And, as if I didn't have enough ongoing scrapbook projects, I seem to have added another one. It's pretty simple, though. I decided that the boys' school pictures would go into their own albums, rather than being part of their regular albums. I have several reasons for this decision. One, I think it will be nice to have all the school pictures in one place to easily watch their growth over the years. Two, it will be easier to maintain these albums from a chronological standpoint. I keep their school pictures in frames until the next year's are taken, so it has been a challenge at times to squeeze those pages into the albums after the fact (when I've actually had their albums current, anyway!). I can be pretty OCD about keeping my albums in chronological order. Once I decided to go through Aaron's albums and pull out all the school pictures (individuals and class photos), I had a time of it trying to keep them in chronological order. The mix of one- and two-page layouts made it more difficult. It seemed that every gap coincided with a two-pager and I had to rearrange and end up with things out of order. A little tough to swallow (some of you can relate, I'm sure!), but I'm happy I decided to do it this way. Caleb's was much easier, since I only had one page to remove--a combination of me being behind and him not having been in school as long.

Hopefully I can get some more pages done soon. Usually posting some to the blog gets me a little motivated. Motivated or not, it gets a little tough in the summer to do any scrapbooking, if for no other reason than one of the boys is camped out at my desk on my laptop on a regular basis. Maybe I'll have myself a mini scrapping marathon next month when they spend some time at Grammy's house. Who am I kidding? I'll be too excited at having the TV to myself and end up watching 18 hours of North and South or some other guilty pleasure TV (that's what I did when they were at Grandma's house last week {hanging my head in shame}).

Anyway....here's the latest batch.

Papers: DCWV, K & Co
Die cuts, rub-ons: K & Co
Cricut Cartridge: Doodle Type
Punch: Fiskars

(I think this was based on one of Amy's sketches, but really I just copied this page from Aaron's album)
Papers: DCWV
Stickers and rub-ons: K & Co, Making Memories

Sketch: Amy Alvis
Papers: K & Co, Paper Studio
Stickers: K & Co

I used the same sketch as above for this one. These are for different albums, so why not? I like how different they look even using the same sketch
Papers: DCWV
Cricut Cartridge: Lyrical Letters

Papers: Provo Craft, DCWV (the background actually had a "Dick and Jane"-type birthday scene in the bottom right corner. I turned it upside down and covered it with the photo)
Stickers: Paper Studio
Cricut Cartridge: Lyrical Letters
Punch: EK Success

Papers: DCWV
Cricut Cartridge: Opposites Attract
Sticker: (maybe) Paper Studio
Sorry for the photo instead of a scan. For some reason, my stitching program kept doing something wonky on this page. I wonder if it had something to do with the graph paper background? I don't know anything about the program so it was easier to do it this way.

Scrapping Scouts Again

Since Aaron has an entire Cub Scout scrapbook, it's only fair that his brother get one, too. I bought the same album and tracked down another Cub Scout paper pad. I still had plenty of embellishments left, knowing that I'd be able to save them for Caleb's album. Then about two weeks ago I was sitting at the pack campfire, watching the boys cross over into the next rank, and I realized that Caleb had already been in Cub Scouts for a year and there were no scrapbook pages to show for it!

My current project, therefore, is getting that album caught up (at least until January 2012, since that's all I have photos printed for). So, with the exception of one "everyday" page I snuck in before I realized I needed to work on the Scout album, that's what all this batch of layouts is. One thing I like about doing the Scout pages, though, is that they go pretty quickly, and it doesn't matter if they all look the same. They are much easier to work with, too, because of the great Scout products K & Co puts out. Some of these pages are literally sticking the photos down and adding some journaling. I don't mind these types of pages, since I think I've said before that my scrapbooking is primarily for memory preservation, rather than artistic expression.

Caleb's Cub Scout album will end up being shorter than his brother's, though. He just crossed from Tiger Cubs to Bear, and will skip the Wolf year. He decided to do this since he is skipping second grade and going into third grade in the fall. He decided rather than staying with his den he started with, he would rather be with the rest of the third-graders. He knows most of them anyway, since he was in a second grade class with them part time most of the year. I'm glad he decided this way, since he will finally be able to identify with one grade (he split his time between two grades for the past two years).

Anyway....(sorry, I get a little sidetracked sometimes) here is a bunch of pages I've done over the past week or so. I know some of these are not much to look at, but my out of town family at least likes to see the photos.

Papers: DCWV, K & Co
Punch: Martha Stewart
Cricut Cartridges: Mickey Font, Lyrical Letters
On this page I used one of my favorite tricks. The green paper is actually from a mat stack, but by putting the white strip across the page, I could "stretch" it to fit the whole page.

Sketch: Amy Alvis
Papers: DCWV, K & Co
Cricut Cartridge: Lyrical Letters
Stickers: K & Co
I used my other favorite trick on this one. I only had one sheet of the yellow cardstock, so I cut it into 3" strips and stuck it to some patterned paper that I knew I'd never use. The other papers just went on top. That's another reason I love these sketches so much. Many of them you can get away with using small amounts of paper.

Sketch: Amy Alvis
Papers: DCWV
Stickers: K & Co
Cricut Cartridge: Alphalicious
I used the same trick on this one. I can use up ugly patterns and conserve my more precious solid cardstock (although a lot of the time I really only have one sheet of a color)!

Papers and stickers: K & Co
Cricut Cartridge: Lyrical Letters

Papers: DCWV, K & Co.
Stickers: K & Co
Punch: EK Success

All Supplies: K & Co
(This one goes into the "at least it's done" file)

Papers: DCWV, K &Co
Stickers: K & Co
Embossing folder: Cuttlebug

Another "It's done" page
Paper: K & Co
Cricut Cartridge: Doodle Type