ABC...Easy as 123

A very good friend of mine just celebrated her birthday. I am a terrible gift giver, and really wanted to give her something that she would love. We don't live near each other anymore and I miss her very much, and wanted to send her something that would tell her how important she is to me.

Of course my immediate thought was a scrapbook, but I knew that a scrapbook takes a LOT of work to put together (and the gift was already late) So I was on a mission to make a meaningful, quick, and good-looking gift album for her. Here's what I did to finish her album in three days!

First I collected all of the pictures of the two of us, and important moments in our friendship that I could find. I scanned them all and had them re-printed at Shutterfly because I didn't have doubles of many of them, and many were in other albums.

***image3:right*** Since the journaling was going to be the most important part of this book, I wanted to have some kind of guidelines to know where to start, finish, and what should go inbetween so I decided to do an ABC book. An ABC book allowed me to go from funny to sentimental, to sad, and back to funny without losing any continuity. Toni is also an elementary school teacher, so the ABC's are definitely a part of what she does and who she is, so it was perfect for this gift album.

I wrote all of my journaling, choosing important words and thoughts that represented our friendship for each letter before I ever started to arrange pictures or papers. I also did some searching on the Internet for various quotes about friendship and added them to my journaling wherever it "fit." I typed all of my journaling into a Word document in the order that it would go in the book. Since I knew I'd be doing computer journaling, this made it VERY easy to just change the fonts, print them and have my journaling completed for each page.

Once I had all of my pictures and journaling, I had to decide on papers. I wanted the whole book to flow together well, so I decided to use all papers from the Mustard Moon Beach Series line. All of the papers matched so well, and were neutral enough to go with any colors in my photos. I chose to use only the Mustard Moon papers and white cardstock. Since choosing papers is what usually takes me the longest, this helped speed up the creation process considerably.

I printed out the alphabet on white cardstock, using the Garamouche font, and cut out each letter, along with the phrase "is for." I then put each of these letters and prases into page protectors in the album that I chose to use.

When my pictures arrived from Shutterfly, I divided them up based on my journaling. I tried to choose photos that went along with the journaling for each letter. I put each of the photos in order into the page protectors so that I could get a general idea of how the pictures would be divided.

After that, all that was left was to create the pages. I used very few embellishments, some various stickers, but mostly just a colorblocking style with the coordinating papers. I printed my journaling (many of the letters at once) on white cardstock using the fonts Garamouche for the words, CK Penman for my journaling, and CK Script for any quotes that I added. And it was easy as 123. The pages were so quick that I had them finished in only three days!

I let the photos and journaling speak for themselves in this book, which is what makes it meaningful to both me and my friend Toni.

View this album in its entirety at MyscrapbookCD:
"The ABC's of Toni and Me -- A journey through our friendship."

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