Kindergarten Memories

Several years ago Kevin and his kindergarten classmates brought home a wonderful memory book that the teacher had assembled for each child using photos and art projects from throughout the year. With its gluestick and construction paper structure, I knew it needed to be preserved in another fashion. I recently took apart the booklet and began my project, carefully scanning his artwork and photos. Today I am going to share two pages that I have created as part of this process, using the fabulous papers and embellishments from Scraptastic's Hall Pass kit.

  
This first layout centers around a questionnaire that each child answered about themselves. Because the teacher wrote in all their answers for them, saving the original paper was not important. The questions and my son's words were printed on a strip of neutral cardstock that had been distressed with Studio Calico Mr. Huey's, Letter Jacket from the Hall Pass add-on and Pinstripe, a nice grey that I had on hand. Strips of various widths were arranged on red cardstock with a thin line of color peeking between each.

 A photo and additional red accents were added: stickers, banner pieces, tabs, arrows and an awesome "hello" photo frame. Popping up the wood veneer word bubble over a darker paper helps it to be more readable. With the wealth of Thickers and letter stickers in the Hall Pass kit and add-on, I was able to have not only a title, but a subtitle as well!
 

 
My second page rescues a large class photo that had been glued into the booklet. After carefully peeling it off the construction paper page, I adhered it to piece of grey cardstock, giving it a narrow frame. Next I used the red wood-look patterned paper as my page base, to coordinate with all those red sweatshirts in the photo itself. But between the two, the background and red sweatshirted kids, I added all sorts of patterns and colors. Several of the flash cards were layered underneath the picture, with the one holding my journaling overlapping on top.

 
Then I got busy with a few office-inspired embellishments, and added the "Good Morning" wood veneer word bubble as if the teacher was greeting her class.

I rubbed the wood veneer with Tim Holtz Distress Ink (mustard seed) to get that nice deep yellow, which then inspired my title. "Classmates", cut from the kit's yellow cardstock, was altered to match by inking the word and spreading a thin layer of Distress Stickles (mustard seed) over the letters. I love how it turned out!

It feels great to be on my way to preserving these special memories of my youngest son's early school days.