Year End Family Craft

December 28, 2010

by Sandy

I seem to be in a state of shock that the year 2010 is already drawing to a close.

No one ever told me that when I had kids, the years would literally fly by.

I’m so afraid I’m going to forget all the fun little things that make parenting small children fun and memorable.

Hence, the craft I’m about to introduce for today!

This is something you can work on over the course of the next few days,

or you can save it for New Year’s Eve.

The nice thing about this project is that you can work at your own pace and personalize it to your family.

Ready?

We’re making a 2010 scrapbook.

But don’t let the word “scrapbook” scare you.

We’re not hauling out circle cutters, crimpers and crazy embossment tools.

If you’d like…we can use the word Memory book.

Or…choose what ever word works well with your craft comfort level.

I started by printing out a bunch of 1/2 pages on my computer using Word.

(actually, they were whole pages, I just modified them to be half pages and cut them after printing)

Personalize these sheets to highlight things that are important to your family!

For our family, I personalized some pages to include: Current Events (2 pages), Major Happenings in 2010 (2 pages) , a page with a sticker frame for our NYE picture (see below forour 2009 pic), A general info. page for each child including grade, age, favorite food and favorite memory from 2010, A page for each boy to draw a self-portrait, a page for each child to trace their hand. Add a few extra blank pages at the back of the book for miscellaneous pictures or verbage (trust me, you’ll use them).

Our family 2009 NYE picture. Oh my, how things have changed!!

Once every page is cut down to size, I give the boys their pages to finish for me.

They love feeling like they are contributing to something larger.

Asking them about favorite memories has been their favorite part so far. They loved thinking back over the year and picking what they wanted to draw. It was amazing, as a parent, to see what they remembered in their drawing.

Self portraits change so much over the years. Don't forget to include these!

I would really recommend either including a picture of your child(ren) or tracing their hands.

Physical size changes so much over a year!

Look at those chunky little fingers!

If you’re making this in advance, you won’t have everything done before you put it all together.

This is especially true if you’re waiting to develop some pictures.

That’s ok!

You can put an unfinished book together!

I found some old scrapbook paper and let the boys pick out what they wanted the covers to look like. They chose some pretty heavy card stock, so I didn’t reinforce it. If you choose some thin paper, just reinforce it by gluing it to card-stock.

Then, line everything up and punch in two holes through the entire stack.

This is when I sent the boys outside in search of “the perfect stick.” It was great. They searched and searched the ground and low hanging branches. It bought me about 25 minutes of very quiet time in the house.

Thank you, perfect stick!

Then, I threaded a rubber band through the holes and secured it by slipping the stick through the holes.

We made a cover illustration with the year on it and glued it to the cover page.

Here is our finished product: