Just a sneak peek at a perpetual memory book I am making for grandparents....I don't want to give away the whole gift now do I! In the past my sister and I had made calendars with a couple of pictures for each month for the grandparents, but this year I decided to make a month by month memory book that we can add to every year. I really think this is more of a keepsake for them and something that we can add to every year.
This was so fun and easy to make with My Digital Studio. I just gathered all my highlight photos up, and played, and played and played. I always feared making a scrapbook before because making a mistake was just too daunting, but with MDS I make tonns of mistakes and just hit delete - Love IT!
As I mentioned before, I am behind in my handmade holiday gifts, and that means I also missed the shipping deadline for guaranteed printing and delivery from Stampin' UP! (today was the deadline for printing and shipping for delivery before Dec.21), plus I need to ship one of these to Alberta.....but no problem! I'm going to print them off on my computer, stick them in a gorgeous linen album (still have to jazz that up a bit with ribbon, buttons and rhinestones) and away it goes. I'm sure this will be a much loved gift.
I made the labels using My Digital Studio. I simply sized the circle punch to 2.5 inches, color filled with opacity set to 40% so that the color would be more muted and the image and writing would really stand out. Then I added a stamped image and text and printed them onto shipping labels. Then, using my large 2.5 inch punch, punched them out and stuck them onto the jars. I think they turned out great! I didn't make the box, because I was feeling overwhelmed with my homemade gifting, and it was 50% off....can't say no to that, but it would be super easy to make with paint and stamps, or even decor elements.
Inside the box my daughter made a nest. It was such a great activity for her, she used my paper trimmer and some old or retired paper that I had, and she set about cutting strips and squishing them up.
I got a lot of use out of my decor elements, including using the adorable cardinal on a glass jar filled with homemade granola as a hostess gift.
Here is another way to package up those spices. I found the BEST instructions on how to make any type of box on Splitcoast. For this one I took a piece of paper, 6" x 7.5", scored at 2" all the way around, folded, trimmed the long edge to where the score lines meet (yes this would best be seen in a photo, you can see a video on Splitcoast) folded and used sticky strip to adhere. Then I used the top note die and the Big Shot and trimmed about 1 inch of the middle out, stuck the outside rounded pieces on both of the long sides and covered the seam in ribbon. Voila - cute!
Finally, as I was making the scrapbooks rather than making calendars for the grandparents, my hubby mentioned how much he enjoyed his calender, so I made him one....again crazy easy using MDS. I used the calender template then saved the pages as jpeg. Then, because I wanted a simple way to print it out at home and I wanted the picture and month on the same page, I started a new project and brought the jpeg images back in as photos, lined up and resized the photo and months, printed them off and trimmed to my desired size. I cut a piece of chipboard, covered it with retired DSP, stamped and embellished, added ribbon to hang both the pages and the project.
