Scrapbooking Ice Hockey...and Other Not-So-Mainstream Sports!

Leave it to my kid. He has always marched to his own beat and it should have been no surprise when he finally found "his" sport in ice hockey. Now don't get me wrong, I have turned into a die-hard hockey mom and there is nothing wrong with ice hockey... until you try to scrapbook it. Then you realize that everyone else's kids play football and soccer and baseball. While it is true that ice hockey is not exactly something you can do just anywhere and anytime, as a hockey mom I felt pretty neglected in the scrapbook supplies department.

So what's a scrapbooker to do? Think creatively, of course! This article is about some ways to scrapbook sports or other activities when commercial scrapbooking supplies are a little scarce. I was glad to see that Scrapjazz carries quite a few hockey-themed papers. So I ordered some and got to work trying to find embellishments that would work.

I was able to find lots of team sports embellishments, just not specific to ice hockey. One way to deal with this situation is to use more generic sports-theme supplies. For example, embellishments saying things like "team work" and "score" work for a lot of sports. As long as they don't have a baseball or football on them, you're in luck. Using a Cricut or other die-cutting machine, you can also cut out your own "hockey" words.

This example also shows how using generic sports-themed elements can work out nicely. Notice that this scrapbooker used a lot of sports-themed embellishments but none that specifically refer to ice hockey. This line, called Making the Team, is by Bella Blvd and uses colors and designs that can work with most any sport. Here is another example of a roller hockey layout. This scrapbooker used Thickers to add the name of the sport.

Another option is to find things that convey your theme but perhaps not in the conventional way. Take for example these skating snowman stickers. While they don't pertain to ice hockey specifically, they still convey the message of cold (icy) and being on ice skates. I also found these ice skating penguins by Jolee's. To find these I searched for penguins. While you wouldn't normally consider these to be hockey-themed, I know they will work for some of the hockey layouts I have planned. But I had to think differently about how to find supplies because ice skating penguins didn't show up in a search for ice hockey.

Sometimes you can modify products to meet your specific needs. Field hockey is another sport that, while totally different from ice hockey, may have some elements you can alter to meet your needs. Check out these field hockey stickers by Karen Foster. With a snip of your scissors "field hockey" becomes "hockey." "Go for the goal," "nice shot," "score," and so forth all fit perfectly with an ice hockey theme.

There are a few Cricut cartridges with hockey options that can help too. Team Spirit is the best one I've found so far. While only a small part of the cartridge's content relates directly to ice hockey, it does contain a lot of the basics like a hockey skate, a medal, an ice hockey goal, sticks, a mask, an emblem with the word "hockey" and a puck. In my layout I used the soccer goal net, modifying the width of it using a Gypsy so it better resembled the proportions of an ice hockey goal.

I hope this gives you some ideas of ways to make great layouts of ice hockey and other less popular sports even when themed supplies are hard to find. Hockey moms have been described as "bulldogs in lipstick." I guess this applies when searching out scrapbooking supplies too -- tenacity and persistence are the keys to success!