Kayla's Scrapbook

I've made scrapbooks for each of my grandsons, Tyler and Jaden. I love documenting their lives for myself, and their parents, and hopefully for them some day. I hope they'll enjoy them in the years to come, and mainly I hope they'll realize and remember how much I loved them and how special they always were to me, right from the beginning.

The first page in each book is just a title page -- their name. This is Tyler's (uh, I guess that's fairly obvious, isn't it).

On a side note--I enjoy looking at my old scrapbook pages. Besides documenting a particular stage in a child's life, or a specific event, almost every page I look at reminds me of my own scrapbooking experience. I can tell what new technique I'd learned, or what I was experimenting with at the time. Sometimes I did pages that didn't work at all, really, but they served a purpose, if nothing more than allowing me to try something new or to discover, the hard way, what does not work.

When I was first scrapbooking about Tyler, for instance, I did not have much equipment, and embellishments consisted mostly of stickers, or maybe a few die cuts or rubber stamps. Six years later, I remember how jazzed I was to have discovered the embossed vellum and the large letter stickers I used. (I never much like my own writing, and was happy to figure out a way to avoid it. I know, I know--all you CM fans will be horrified by that admission!)

A few years later, when I was working on Jaden's book, I had acquired quite a few little "goodies," including my favorite at the time, a Sizzix machine and several different fonts. Almost every page included some lettering made with the Sizzix. Again, a neat way to avoid having to handwrite the information.

Jaden's title page was no exception. I was pretty happy with the lettering, as it was my most recent Sizzix font set acquisition.

And now we come to 2009, and Kayla's soon-to-happen birth. I've been looking forward to this experience of having a granddaughter ever since we learned that's what we were getting this time. I've of course also been collecting "girlie" scrapbook supplies for a few months now, in anticipation. This last week, I started her book, and I made her very first page, the title page. I had to wait until the decision was firm about her name, and I am assured by her parents that it is. I was initially going to wait until her birth, just in case. But then I decided, though, that even if they were to change their minds and name her something completely different, this would make a funny story in the future--how her grandma made a scrapbook page with the wrong name in it!

So here is Kayla's title page, not yet even in the book when I took this picture. And, true to form, it includes my newest obsession--the Cricut machine I have gushed about in a previous post or two. Still loving it! And love Kayla already--can't wait to meet her!