Although I may not have blogged much about it lately, I have been doing a LOT of scrapbooking over the past year. I've worked on my chronological family albums (still not caught up but at least I'm withing striking distance of Bailey's college graduation) as well as my heritage albums.
With my heritage albums, I'm working my way from the oldest photos to the newest, and in that vein I am now at the point where I've scrapbooked my parents' wedding and early life. I'm almost ready to be born! hehe Working on my heritage albums has been the most interesting and rewarding scrapbooking I've ever done, hands down. I'm so happy to have completed many albums so far with more in the works.
As if those two ongoing scrapbooking projects weren't QUITE enough, I was recently inspired to jump into another album project that's been on my list since I started working on the heritage albums: My own childhood and school years. Katie, a super talented gal who works at the store where I teach, recently shared her own boys' school albums and they were just so succinct and perfect that I felt inspired to make albums of my OWN school years.
As of this writing, I've worked my way from Kindergarten through Fourth Grade and let me tell you, I underestimated how fun and even cathartic this process would be. I've thought about why that may be and here's what I've landed on: I'm actually scrapbooking my OWN memories and activities. By contrast, the events I've included in my chronological albums are often my daughter's activities; for my heritage albums, many times I only have photos and basic information with no memories at all. So with this project, I have the chance to reflect back on my childhood years. It's gratifying to put my own photos, school papers, and memories together in one album -- instead of languishing in a box in the basement!
I am so grateful to my mom who kept all of my school papers and photos -- and I DO mean all. But I wish we'd taken the time to date the papers and photos. I have consolidated my school papers into a couple of tubs but they are largely undated. Of course, I won't keep them all but the finicky side of me has to have some semblance of order before deciding which ones to discard.
I'm sure I'll end up with too many school papers to fit into the scrapbook itself, and many are oversized anyway. If I could pare it down to a smaller, organized box, I'd be happy with that.
Awhile back, I organized my school pictures in a small album with sleeves, so it's been easy to pull out a particular year of photos, pair them with the memorabilia for that year, and make a few pages.
Here's a photo taken on the first day of Kindergarten. My mom saved the picture I'm holding, too.
She kept a small spiral-bound school album for about three years then gave it up. Inside the binder I found a few treasures for those years.
For each grade, I'm making a 12x12 "cover" page with my school photo, grade, and dates. I'm also making a 12x12 facing pocket onto which I can adhere the class photo, teacher name, and anything else pertinent. The deep pocket is a great place to put those loose papers so they can be pulled out easily.
Mom even kept my nametag so I had to include it, too.
I have fairly detailed memories from my elementary school years so I'm planning to type them up and add them to each year. I even found my mom's old calendars and my diary from those years which is a great way to jog my memory!
I recently made a Fourth Grade page about my childhood love of reading. I still have all the books I ordered through the Weekly Reader program, so I took pictures of them to include on a page. It's so much fun to think about what interested me back then. Truthfully, I'm pretty much exactly the same as I was in my childhood!
I'll be sure to share more photos as I go along but so far, this has been a thoroughly enjoyable project and one that I'll be really glad I took the time to put together. If you're thinking about starting your own school album, by all means DO IT!
Thanks for stopping by!
