Grandma

When I scrapbook, I mainly focus on my kids or granddaughter, I want to preserve their memories, but sometimes I look backwards and scrapbook about my life growing up. This is one of those layouts that’s special to me because it has one of my favorite photos of my grandmother and me.

I was so blessed to have three godly grandparents in my life who would pray for me and invested in me, but of the three, I was closest to my Grandma Myers. She was the grandma that baked cookies with me - pink and white pinwheels, read stories to me, and could turn everyday moments into teaching opportunities. She loved Jesus and telling us grandkids about him. She always prayed for us, and encouraged us to walk with him.

I know some of my love of scrapbooking came from my grandmother. She would show me her tattered scrapbook, which was an old weekly planner, and point out pictures she had saved or poems or quips she had clipped out of magazines, and even a letter I had written her when I was little, and a ballerina napkin from my 5th birthday party. Miraculously, I was given this book a couple of years after she passed away, and it’s so precious to me.

One of my favorite aspects of going to grandma’s house was pulling out the craft box she kept for me. The craft box was a magical box that had all sorts of paper, stickers, fabric scraps, seed catalogs with pictures of flowers and other magazines I could cut apart. Along with all these treasures there were scissors, glue, crayons, tape and sometimes even glitter. I never knew when a new treasure would be added. It was everything a little girl could want to make wonderful creations! I would carefully carry this amazing treasure out of her closet and set up camp on her coffee table to cut and glue the hours away.

I am so grateful to have had a special relationship with my grandmother. This one photo brings back so many warm and fuzzy memories, and when I came across a copy of this photo I knew I had to scrapbook it.

Scrapbooking Tips

Normally when I sit down to create a layout, I will pull from the colors in my photo to choose my papers, but not this time. I know this pictures was taken around Christmas, but I wanted to create a more feminine look.

I went to some of my favorite papers and selected soft floral patterns and pastels. I then attempted to die cut the pieces to create this heart. I’m not too proud to tell you that it took me a couple of tries, but after wasting some paper, I decided to make my own temple and pieced together this heart. I’m glad I stuck with it though, because I really like how the heart turned out.

I decorated about 3/4 of the heart with flowers and vines, overlapping the flowers as I went. To cover the entire border of the heart overpowered my photo, that’s why I didn’t carry the flowers all the way around. Where there are no flowers, I stitched a simple border about 1/4 inch from the edge. The stitching helped give the heart a complete look.

I loved the look of the wood grain paper as the background. At first I had white card stock as my base, but it washed out the whole design.

For my title I kept it simple by using my Silhouette Cameo to die cut my title. My finishing touches were a few pearl Nuvo Drops around the outside of the heart.

I think my grandmother would really like this layout!

Supplies used:

Pattern paper, floral pieces - Coco Vanilla

Title die cut - Ginny Nelson Silhouette Design ID 8814

Nuvo Drops in Cloud 9

Embroidery floss - DMC