Celebrating Our Friendships

Girlfriends: The word conjures up many images, from slumber parties of giggling teenagers to Thelma and Louise making a run for it. No matter what images spring to your mind, chances are you have some girlfriends in your life. Between our workday crunch and family responsibilities, time spent with our female friends is nothing short of golden. These priceless memories will shine in scrapbook projects and layouts like those shown here.

Tribute to a Soul Sister
If you are like me, you’ve probably had many friends over the years. Some of them are part of our lives for a short time, and then we both move on, richer for our shared experiences. If you’re really lucky, you might find one of those true friends for life, one with whom you share a sisterhood that transcends distance. For me, that friend is Julie. We met like any other friends over some shared activities, but during the ten years we lived in the same town, the friendship deepened. Julie moved to a state halfway across the country, but the friendship is strong as ever. Celebrate this kind of gift with a special album commemorating your friendship. Here’s how I created mine.

• Choose photos that highlight your friendship. Resize and convert to black and white.


• Decide how you will present the photos. I chose to place mine in a Making Memories mini-album. The small size really limited me, but also allowed me to distill our years to their essence.


• Pick a common theme to connect your photos. The theme can be your choice of materials, a common thread for your journaling, or both, as I’ve done with mine. Working with papers and embellishments from Making Memories, I placed a photo on each decorated page, documenting what a “good friend” is like, in photos and calligraphy.

Celebrate Good Times
Part of friendship is enjoyment of common interests, whether they involve book clubs, travel or the ever-popular shopping. Consider bringing along the camera for some of these activities, taking some photos and then savoring them years later in your scrapbooks. I have layouts of dinner get-togethers, winter nature hikes, Superbowl parties and mutual ear-piercing experiences. Those of us who are fortunate enough to have the advantage of age that allows us to be Red Hatters can enjoy pulling out the stops to create layouts in purple and red.

Now that my friend Julie lives in California wine country, I have been given a new excuse for travel. We both enjoy gourmet cooking and eating, and her new town is filled with wonderful shops that cater to gourmands. This layout features us doing the one kind of shopping we both enjoy, sampling the flavored olive oils for which the region is famous. Years from now, I can look back at this layout and remember the fun of this late autumn visit with a good friend.

“crazeeforscraps is online”
If you are reading this article, you’ve joined the many that have discovered life online. Chances are good that in the process, you may have made some wonderful friendships. Maybe you’ve been able to get together “in real life” or you simply love to IM in the wee hours of the night. Celebrate this 21st century friendship with layouts as well.

Many of us who have formed friendship groups online have participated in creating circle journals, which are passed through the group of friends with each adding pages until it returns to its owner.

Another way to celebrate these friendships is the creation of a friendship page swap. Each group will decide how to proceed, but here are some tips.

• Agree on the format. Make sure that if the items are to be mailed, the format is easy to send, especially if some members of the friendship group are international. Don’t limit your format to layouts. Oversized tags are another fun way to proceed.


• Choose one person to be the manager. This person needs to be able to gently remind everyone of deadlines, as well as sorting and mailing out each set of pages when they have all been collected.


• Be understanding of the need for some participants to possibly drop from the project due to life circumstances. Often, most are willing to extend deadlines in order to include everyone.

This page was done for a friendship page swap. There were 18 people participating, and we each created a two-page spread with 6”x6” pages. Having an actual creation made by an online friend makes the friendship tangible.

The Story of a Friendship
Make sure that when you create your designs, you include the stories behind the photos. Bullet lists that share all your shopping stops on an excursion, email exchanges printed out and artfully included in a journaling block, copies of your long distance phone bill that you got calling back and forth to plan an event are all clever ways to help share the stories behind your friendships.

Don’t forget to include good old-fashioned storytelling in your designs. The layout shown here is really ordinary and uninteresting, except for the journaling. It tells about our ten-year cookie-baking ritual, and when Julie looked at this layout, she finally understood why I enjoy creating scrapbooks. She told her husband, “Look, this is the whole history of our friendship, right on these two pages!” I hadn’t thought of it quite like that, but as I read over the development of this tradition and the various milestones along the way, it does give a timeline to the development of our relationship. Although it is artistically uninspired, it remains today one of my very favorite girlfriend layouts for that very reason.

Enjoy reliving all those good times and even the hard ones that are the mark of a true friend as you celebrate friendship in your scrapbooks.

Create your own friend inspired projects with friend scrapbooking supplies from Scrapjazz.