Project 2 is up, people! The School Days Pocket Scrapbook. The concept of this photo/memory album is not only that you can record the events of the school year, but that you create pockets on the pages so you can tuck things into them. The main reason I could see needing pockets is if you have something with multiple pages or a back that has something important on it. Other than that, this project is just a regular scrapbook with a school theme.
Let me say up front, I’ve never been a fan of “themed” scrapbooks. That’s the good thing about this project, though– it’s making me rethink some of my reified notions about the kinds of crafts I think are worthwhile. (Sorry for the grad school talk, there.) After making a school days scrapbook, I can see its value. A place to gather all the keepsakes you want to save, a simple way to organize memories from year to year, and ultimately, a great book that you can easily hand down to your kids, since it keeps their stuff separate from other siblings. I save a lot of crap, but if you aren’t much of a saver you could keep one book for elementary, one for middle school , etc. I think it’d have to be an awfully big book to cover K – 12, though.
However, my problem with a book like this is the gray area. Just like with the Lego storage, I struggle with a system that isn’t completely clear. So, what do you do with extracurricular sports stuff in a “school days” album? It’s not technically related to school; my 6 year old plays Little League with a whole separate organization. Do I put that stuff in? What about summer camp or summer activities? Maybe I need a separate sports album, then, too. Does that mean I also need a separate music album? You see my problem. It’s that my kid is way too overscheduled.
Once again, this project was relatively simple, with one little hitch. The craft requires that you have a scrapbook to start out with, so I bought a very standard one at Michaels in 8 1/2″ x 11″ pages. Great. As I mentioned above, the main element of this book is the pocket page, which you craft yourself with notebook or graph paper or, like I did, out of enormous pieces of that elementary school printing paper with the big lines and the dotted line down the middle. And here’s the hitch. You are supposed to attach the paper to your scrapbook pages in order to create pockets. But most store-bought scrapbooks these days come with pages in plastic protectors, which kind of defeats the purpose of the pockets. AND, it’s the plastic protectors that are actually attached to the binding of the book, so it’s not like you can just take the page protector off and use a blank sheet (in fact, the blank sheets of your scrapbook have no holes; they are just plain 8 1/2″ x 11″ white sheets).
So, I had to make some pages to create the pocket pages. Here’s what I did.
Using stiff scrapbook paper, I cut a sheet to the same overall size as the page protector.
never mind the holes; those come later
Then, I scored a line along the left-hand edge, about 1/2″ in. (For those of you unfamiliar with scoring, I basically gouged a line with a dull implement– in this case, my bone folder.) The distance from the edge is determined by the page protector; where the page protector bends is where you want your homemade paper page to bend. By scoring it, you allow the thicker paper to bend without ripping. Then, I lined the paper up with the page protector and punched holes to match those in the plastic sheet.
scoring the edge and punching the holes
Then, you end up with this:
ready for the pocket part
Now you can glue the sheets of notebook paper on to make pockets. I had some super large paper, so I just cut it to the width of the page (minus the folded up part) and then folded the bottom up to make a pocket. I glued (actually, double-sided taped) the edges together so it formed a pocket. Then, to make a slightly smaller pocket on the bottom (so you have two places to slide keepsakes), I simply cut a piece to size and taped it on three sides (bottom, left & right) to make another little pocket. Voilà!
Kinda hard to see the pockets here, but you’ll see better in the final product.
So, all that just to make the pocket pages. The rest of the scrapbook you simply use school paper of whatever type you choose for a background. So I cut paper to fit the 8 1/2″ x 11″ sheet in the page protectors and glued them on. Ultimately, I’m not sure that was worth it, so I didn’t do it on every page.
So, here’s what a few of the final pages looked like:
** Notice here how I have a photo from Little League. Does it belong? You decide.
a regular page on the left and the pocket page on the right
I put a little book that the 6 year old made and a multi-page piece about friendship in the pockets, since you’ll want to take them out to look at them. Here’s a couple of other views of the pocket action:
How about that?
And one more page…
TIME INVESTED
About 4 hours
The pocket page took about 30 minutes to make, after I figured out the design. The pages with notebook paper took about 10 minutes each to make (double sided). If you have all your keepsakes already chosen, the layout can go relatively quickly. Applying the pieces to each sheet takes 5 – 10 minutes per side. So we aren’t talking about a fast project. All told, if you make a 10 page book with 2 pocket pages (which would equal 20 sides worth of school stuff), you’d be looking at about 3 – 5 hours of work. And that’s with your pieces already chosen; you can spend countless hours going through kids’ schoolwork.
My advice would be to edit school memories as they come in, and to keep a folder of things you might want to scrapbook. Even better would be to do a few pages at a time as you accumulate things, so by the end of the year you will have a completed book.
PROJECT COST
- scrapbook, $11.24 (on sale)
- notebook paper, $0.99 per package
TOTAL: $12.23 (not including shipping and tax or any additional embellishments you want).
DIFFICULTY
Easy
WAS IT WORTH IT?
Probably. There aren’t too many other ways to display and keep school memories in a way that makes them easily accessible and safe. The only real question here is whether you want to keep them in a big pile in a folder (which isn’t a bad option, you know) or if you want to keep them in a displayable format.
SOURCES
All the supplies I used are available at crafts stores, such as Michaels or Jo-Ann Fabric.
Next up will be the heritage album, which I’m kind of excited about. We shall see!
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Whoa! First off, the book looks really cute–you’ve clearly got layout skillz.
As I read I was thinking, “She will say this wasn’t worth it,” because it seems like a ton ass of work, and are there not products and scrapbooky type things that do pretty much this? I do have the file folders of art for each year, and my mother-in-law is the scrapbooker. (Bless her, she is scrapbooking my kids’ lives for me.) So I’m not the expert, I just would have thought that there were other ways to skin this cat. They wouldn’t be so cute and theme-y though, I imagine.
Again, awesome work with this series.
Actually, I’m not aware of any products that will do this for you– maybe like a baby book for older kids, with spaces for sports awards, school awards, the class photo, etc? There must be something out there, and if not, I suppose I’ve found my Etsy niche. But it seems that every kid’s school experience is so different that it would be hard to have a one-size-fits-all book that you can just tuck stuff into. It’s a little harder to personalize with stickers or stamps or patterned papers, but you can go minimalist and then I’m not sure it’s any more work to customize your own book. But I gotta get on the interwebs and see if there is something pre-made out there.
Wow–that looks really good! It does sound like a lot of work though. You’re right–editing things as they come in is probably the key. We are practically drowning in a sea of paper here, and if the kids catch me throwing anything out, I get in major trouble!
I agree with Becky, you’ve got skilz, girl.
Hi,
Brilliant ideas. Please could you tell me which tool you use to make holes in the page protectors & card?
Hi Julie… The page protectors come with the holes already punched, but for the cardstock I used Martha Stewart’s screw hole punch. It is brilliant. You can get it at Michaels. It works so great because you can punch holes anywhere– right in the middle of a piece of paper if you want. Here’s a link to it: http://shop.marthastewart.com/Martha-Stewart-Screw-Punch/A/B002FW4G9M.htm.