A Gift Full of Love

Good morning! Today I'm sharing the one gift this year, that I was beyond excited to GIVE. My niece and I spent a lot of time together in 2014. I made an effort to see her at least once a week, even if it was only for 10 minutes before her T-ball practice. I love taking pictures of the things we do together, and I have all these pictures of her that I wanted to share with her. I know I could have just created a photo book, or put them all into a photo album and gave that to her, but I wanted to put some love into it. Every single page of this book has a memory, something I love about her, and/or something I hope she holds onto when she's older.

She just turned 4, so she obviously can't read yet. But my hope, is that when she's older, she realizes just how precious something like this is. All the products are from my stash, all the cutfiles are from www.iheartstudio.ca or are from the 30 Days of Me class at Studio Calico. I'm not typing too much in this post, mostly because there's a lot of photos. I snapped all of these really quickly before I gave her the album, so some of them aren't the greatest, and if I'd had more time I would have split them up into two page spreads to share each week. I would have also loved to have shared the products, and a few suggestions, or techniques, but if you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment or e-mail me.

This pocket page is from Studio Calico. One thing I hate is that the pockets are weird sizes, like 2 1/4" square, and 3 1/2" square. I made it work by printing the photo larger and trimming it down to fit. I used scrapbook paper in the other pockets and just trimmed it to fit. I added a sequin pocket in the colors from this page and the next.

I had printed these pictures first, and just mounted them on white cardstock and slipped them into the pockets.

For the see-through pocket on this page, I found two circle stickers that were the same size and just stuck them back to back and sewed the pocket shut so it wouldn't slide out.

This is another pocket page from Studio Calico. It has six 2 1/4" pockets. I printed some photos and trimmed them down. I added a triple heart die cut and some sequins to the pocket next to the journaling.

One of my goals for 2015, is to do more traditional scrapbooking. I have a bunch of embellishments, and given that my Project Life style seems to be pretty clean and simple, I need somewhere to use all those papers and pretty embellishments I keep hoarding!

Thank you for coming by to see this album. I put a lot of love into it, and I hope it's something she treasures for years to come.

-Alexandria