Growing The Next Generation of Scrapbook/Crafters

Today I am posting the work of my 7yo granddaughter. 

She loves animals with a passion so we put together a mini-scrapbook for her to put cute animals in. She did most of the work - with a small amount of help but a lot of direction from me. I think she did a pretty bang-up job on it (all things considered . . . not the least of which is the fact that she is ADHD and not on medication - translation? A lot of patience on my part and a lot of telling her to come back & lets finish what we have laid out). 

We started by folding an 8X10 manila envelope in half and adding bright pink Duct Tape for added strength in the binding. I cut a square from a scrap of blotter paper and had her write the title on it. She stamped a flower border across the top & bottom and then we layered her title square with some blue cardstock. After running two short strips of woven ribbon through the Xyron I had her affix those to a pink cardstock (roughly 5X7, but not exact). Next up I ran the title card through the Xyron with a laminate feed and had her add that to the pink card. I ran the ATG on that and let her place it on her book cover :

I ran a zig-zag stitch around the pink cardstock for the layering aspect as well as to better secure it to the front. Once she had folded about eight sheets of paper in half and stacked those for me I sewed those to the inside. I only managed to get one line of stitching in the book when my needle broke and being the negligent crafter that I am I had no back-up needle so one row of stitching will have to do.

I added a Library card and card pocket to the inside of her book and stamped her birthday (without a year) in the "Return Date" field and had her sign the book out. I then had her glue the pocket in place and put the card in it's pocket. 

that bright white patch is where I photo-shopped her last name out - paranoia I guess - LOL.

I had her stamp a large background stamp to the opening page and then we drew a box around it to add a little more fullness. After she stamped it I realized the larger stamp was probably a little too large for her to try to get a good clean stamp - but it has it's own character.

From here we just started filling the pages with animals. No journaling . . . for one, her handwriting is still too large and unruly for journaling and for two, my patience level is too small for working with an ADHD on journaling at this time. SO, it is image only this go round. 

First two pages are pictures of her own kitten. It is a kitten that lives at her house - not mine - so I only have the two images I got from her other grandmother's facebook page. But it was enough to start her book out with. The rest are all images I pulled from the internet - various sources, so no specific credit given - some were cute pictures people had posted to their facebook page and some were from some other (unknown, unremembered) site. Several came from Chill on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ChillLive. But they are all just cute pictures of animals that she likes.

Here I will point out the artistic slant of the bunnies and the lavender paper behind it - all her doing . . . unintentional? yes, but artistic none-the-less. She is so talented that even she doesn't know it :D

In this image and the next we added stickers for added layering and interest. Yes, I explained that to her but my guess is that if her momma asked her why we added the stickers her response would be "because they are cute".

Source credit: bottom picture - the four squared cat - Plain Chicken blog:  http://www.plainchicken.com/2012/07/meow-monday_16.html 

Ahhh, the image above has a tree branch that she drew (okay, she copied the example I drew for her, but she drew it in her book herself) and we added some 3-D leaf stickers. Too cute!

And again with that super-fantastic artistic slant to the cat and the purple paper! She's good, what can I say?

And, since the book is only half full, she has extra trim and stickers in the back of her book so that when she goes back home her mom or her other grandmother can help her add more pictures to the rest of the book:

Hopefully one day she will be less ADHD and we can do crafts together all the time. For now I have to limit how often I venture into that arena since my nerves can't handle too much of it at a time. But all in all I'm very very proud of what she did and I think her little book is adorable!


(EDIT: After I blogged this we went back and added some washi tape to some pages and some marker doodling to some other pages - not taking new pix though.)