Preparing for the Star Wars Birthday Party

Check this out.  Here is Trevor in April 2013 at his first-ever cake decorating lesson.

And here is Trevor in April 2014, coincidentally wearing the same shirt and sitting at the same table, after one year of cake decorating lessons.  Look at how dramatically his piping skills have improved!

Trevor's first cake (April 2013):

Trevor's most recent cake (April 2014):

You may be wondering what cake decorating has to do with the title of my post, 'Preparing for the Star Wars Party.'  A lot, actually, as we'll be holding Trevor's birthday party at this bakery! Several of his friends have come along with him to cake decorating lessons over the past year and they've all had a blast.  I'm not sure whether it was Trevor or me who first suggested having his birthday party there, but we both thought it was a fabulous idea.  We talked with the owner, Janis, and learned that our perfect date was open.  Yea!  We also learned that the party would be quite affordable (not as cheap as the $35 total I spent on last year's Angry Birds party, but much less than many of the party venues around here).  Yea again!  

As I've mentioned before, Trevor has chosen a Star Wars theme.  Our first task was to decide what design we wanted the party guests to make for their cakes.  We discussed options, scrolled through images online, made sketches, and went to the bakery for a consultation.  Janis had some great suggestions and we finalized our design.  I'm not going to spoil the surprise now.  I promise to share plenty of photos from the party.

With location, date, time and theme in place, Trevor and I were ready to make invitations.  We started with a photo of a Yoda minifig, then digitally added text, and ordered prints. Unfortunately, the developer left weird purple smears on the white background that we didn't notice until two days later when we opened the envelope.  Lesson learned: check photos before leaving the store!  We decided the smears weren't bad enough to spend the time or effort getting reprints.  We matted the prints with light and dark brown, then added neon-green cardstock light sabers, which we decorated with Stickles.  

Since we'll be at a bakery, we won't be having a pinata this year.  We'll be playing a few short games, but the primary activities will be cake decorating, present opening, and cake eating.  I think it's going to be a lot of fun and I can't wait!

Graduation Card and Craft Basket

Day 2 of Lain Ehmann's CreativeLive workshop!  If you have time today between 9:00 am and 4:00 pm Pacific, hop on over and watch!  I promise to tell you ALL about it and share what I made once I carve out a block of time to scan and upload.  Realistically, that translates into "not until next week."  In the meantime, I'll be showing you some of the creative things I've been doing this month now that I'm done sharing layouts from National Scrapbook Day.

Here is the card I made for our nephew, Ian, who graduated from CSU Chico last weekend.  I did a quick search to learn their school colors (cardinal and white) before adding the sash and tassel.

My inspiration was this card by Katherine Pritchard.  I really like the simple design.  I think this will be my new go-to graduation card.  I love how easy it is to customize it with school colors.

Speaking of school, Trevor's teacher asked me if I would be in charge of our class basket for the silent auction at the school carnival.  Of course I said yes.  I chose an arts & crafts theme (naturally) and collected items and/or cash donations from the students.  I recruited a fellow parent, Annie, to join me for a shopping spree.  (I've learned that, when handling other people's money, it is always a good idea to have a second adult present.)  We had great fun zipping through Michaels throwing things into the cart!  That was the easy part.  Squeezing all the goodies into the basket in an attractive manner was much, much harder!  There's a lot of hidden tape keeping everything in place.

Here's what the basket looked like when Annie and I were done.

That's $140 worth of craft supplies stuffed in there!  Whoever wins it is going to be in craft heaven.  I hope it brings in a lot of money for the school.

Scrapping My Story

The big day is here!  Today I'm at CreativeLive for Lain Ehmann's "Scrapbook Your Story" workshop!  If you have time between 9:00 am and 4:00 pm Pacific, follow the link to watch and/or chat live.  I think it's going to be an outstanding workshop.

I've been thinking a lot about the topic of "Scrapbook Your Story."  I'm very eager to hear what Lain has to say and what her perspective is.  As I looked back through my albums in preparation for the class, I came across layouts with tons of journaling, some with minimal journaling, and a few with no journaling at all.  It's no surprise to me, but the ones with the most journaling are the ones that mean the most to me all these years later.  While the pictures do trigger lots of memories, it's the written words that add so much more depth and meaning.

Take, for example, my album from my Model Organization of American States trip in 1989.  A long time has passed between then and now.  At 17, I experienced things I thought I'd remember forever... but time has a way of fading (or even erasing) memories.  When I look at the album 25 years after I made it, I am absolutely thrilled that I took the time then to tell the story behind the photos.  I'm grateful for every word I wrote in my own handwriting.  In fact, if I could tell my 17-year old self anything, it would be to add even more detail, to write down every single thing I never want to forget.  Because, sadly, I will forget a lot of it.  This album has allowed me to share my memories with people who didn't know me then, and to reminisce with those who did.  I love that.

Eventually, I'm going to scan in all my older scrapbooks.  I'm nervous about the fact that they're not backed up, plus I want to be able to share them here and giggle about the evolution of my style.  For now, I thought I'd share some of my favorite layouts from Trevor's first 5 years (2006-2011) that do a good job of really telling my story.

First, this layout from 2008.  The photo is too dark and the title a bit lonely, but I absolutely love this layout.  Reading about all of Trevor's toddler quirks makes me smile.  I never want to forget these things.

Here's one from 2007, about Trevor's first artwork.  I used his three pieces of art at the top.  I love that I wrote about him eating the yellow paint (and spitting it up); that's something I'd forgotten.

Here's another from 2007.  Trevor was a late crawler.  In fact, he learned to crawl (at 10 months) the same week he started walking!  Reading my journaling brings me right back to the frustration Trevor felt and how mad he would get trying to crawl.

I made this layout in 2010, using the photo from Trevor's first passport.  The journaling talks about the fact that he'd been to 6 countries by the time that first passport expired... yet because we'd traveled by cruise ship, his passport remained unstamped!

Another 2008 layout.  While I don't love the titlework or embellishments, the journaling on this is incredible.  I am so glad I captured the depths of the love Steve and I have for Trevor.

Here's a 2009 layout.  The journaling talks about my transition from being a classroom teacher to 32 to being a stay-at-home mom of 1.  I love reading what I wrote.  My feelings now are exactly the same as they were five years ago when I made this layout.

I could go on and on, but I'll leave off with this layout from 2011.  It's one of my all-time favorites.  Again, I feel exactly the same way today as I did when I wrote it.

Just a quick peek into how I scrap my story!  Feel free to check out more recent examples of my scrapping here.

Lego KidsFest

This is the last layout I made on National Scrapbook Day.  I really struggled with it.  It was the end of a long day of scrapping, so that was definitely a factor.  Picking the color scheme was easy (which is good since it was past sunset and I hate trying to select colors without natural light), but cropping the photos was a challenge and keeping them from being overwhelmed was hard too.  But I'd say the number 1 reason this layout was tough is because I was scrapping an event I didn't attend, so it was really tough to decide what story I wanted the layout to tell.  

In the past, I've almost never scrapped something where I hadn't actually been there.  But Trevor really wanted these photos in his scrapbook, which sealed it for me.  I don't love the layout, but Trevor does, so I'm happy about that.

First Time on Ice Skates

Another National Scrapbook Day layout!  In past years, I've set a goal to complete every challenge at Scrapbook.com, but this year I decided only to do the layout challenges.  Then it turned out that one of the layout challenges was using pocket pages, which I don't do, so I skipped that too.  I did complete all 7 of the standard layout challenges, so mission accomplished.  

Here's the first of two layouts I made on NSD that weren't for a challenge:

I LOVE how this turned out.  I think it might be one of my all-time favorite layouts.  I made this immediately after the Title It challenge, which definitely influenced how I put together the title.  I've never done a white/grey/yellow layout before.  I can thank the ice rink for that fun combination, since those were the colors of our rental skates.

One more NSD layout to share!