Kraft Pocket Album

I'm still trying to play catch up with my blog posts.  It got a little hectic over the holidays and I just couldn't seem to find time to take pictures and sit at the computer to post anything.  I certainly have been crafting but I probably did more organizing than crafting.  I always find that I want to reorganize my house at the holidays.  Do you get into these moods too?  Sometimes I think I'm the only one that gets so obsessed with organizing.  I think a big reason that I do this around Christmas is to make room for all the new toys my boys will get.  This year I went quite a bit beyond that though.  I completely reorganized my laundry/storage room which was quite an undertaking, but it is sooooo much better now.  I can finally get to things without having to move everything out of the way first and fighting to pull things out of corners.  I consolidated all of my pantry items to the storage room which hopefully will stop us from continually having expired food because we had things stored in so many places.  I hate having to throw out food because we forgot to eat it! 

My next big change was because we finally broke down and got a new tv for the rec room/craft room.  This was supposed to encourage my husband to spend time downstairs with us when I'm crafting and the boys are playing.  We did watch one movie there so far but now we're back in construction mode (we bought another rental house) so we hardly have time to sit together at all.  Well, I'm really going off on a tangent here.  I just thought it might be nice to add a few little personal notes here instead of just the crafting.

So, I bought two of these Kraft Pocket Albums a while back and finally got around to working on them.  So far I've only completed this one but the second one will be much faster since I'm just going to copy this one.  All in all it really didn't take me very long to do this but sometimes I spend a little too much time trying to decide what to do. 

The album is for my boys report cards. As soon as I saw these pocket albums I knew that they would be perfect for report cards.  I wanted to keep them fairly simple as I've done some other books lately and find that I put to many things on the pages and then they won't close properly. 

I cut out the ruler detail and all of the other shapes in the album using the Cricut Artbooking cartridge.  I love this cartridge and find that there are so many ways to use it.  I also love the new Framework Alphabet stamp set.  I think it's a perfect fit for the title for this book.  I added a few other embellishments and used a large brad as a closer to hold the hemp string.  I knew the book would need some kind of closer as it will be pretty full once all the report cards are in it.

There are just enough pages in the book to do one for each grade K - 8.  Since we have junior and senior kindergarten I figured they could share a page.  I used the retired Typeset paper pack since I still had quite a bit of this left over.  It really suits the school theme.  You can see that I already have one report card in the book but I can't seem to locate the one from jk.  It's around somewhere, probably in my mementos for scrapbooking pile.

I wanted to include a picture on each page so that we can see how much the boys change over the years.  I will probably try to always put the first day of school but I didn't have a good one for sk so we'll just see how things go.

When I was part way through the album I decided that I wanted to have a consistent title on each page.  I played around with a few ideas and a few different stamps and finally decided on this little banner detail.  I like that each page has it in the same location and the same size.  It gives it a nice feeling as you flip the pages even though they are different papers.

Here are the rest of the pages.  I might add a class picture to each pocket or maybe a piece of writing from that year.  I haven't decided yet and maybe it will something that evolves over the coming years.

I'd love to hear your thoughts and comments.  This was a fun little project and I think it will be something that my boys will have fun looking at when they are older.