Have you been playing along with the June TDP challenges? This month’s word is “Celebrate.” My challenge for you is to celebrate the EVERYDAY. Sure, we all scrap the big events of life, but how about the normal, sometimes boring, mundane “everyday” stuff that makes life great (or crazy, or whatever!)? It’s the normal everyday stuff of life that is so easy to forget if we don’t document them somewhere and for me it’s these memories that I really want to remember years down the road.

I’m going to share with you a couple of pages that celebrate the “Everyday”:

My daughter loves to use FaceTime to connect with her cousins who she doesn’t see super often. As time goes on technology is going to change and the way we connect with people will change as well and I want to remember these moments, so I snapped a couple photos of her FaceTiming and created this page. Click here for credits.

My daughter has always loved to bake. On this “Life is Sweet” page I documented her excitement over a purchase of a cupcake stand. Not a big moment, but something that made me smile because she combined her love of baking and her love of photography!

This page from Erin called “Makes me Smile” does just that!

Selfies. We all take them, right? Laura created this page using some of the selfies her little guy took while riding in the car one day. What fun moments to showcase on a page!

Here’s a fun page by Rachel titled “Unique” where she scrapped some photos of her daughter making funny faces.

And finally, here’s a super fun page by Katie showcasing her kids playing in the water.  I love pages of kids concentrating on the work of playing!

I hope these pages motivate you to document the everyday. I’m hosting an “Celebrate the EVERYDAY” challenge. Head on over to The Digital Press Challenge Forum for details!

About the Author:  Barbara is a member of the creative team here at The Digital Press. She lives with her husband, two teenage kids and their adorable dog; although as she types this she’s misting up thinking about the fact that her son is moving away to college in just two months and she will no longer be able to say she lives with her two kids. EEK! In Barbara’s free time she loves to digi scrap, take photos and hang out with her family.

Friendship is one of the most meaningful relationships that we experience in life. It teaches us how to connect to other people and how to nurture relationships outside of your family. Friendships can be established throughout life and can last for small amounts of time (friends you make at camp, for example) or they can last a lifetime. It’s important that we celebrate all aspects of friendship in our scrapbooks since it has such a big impact upon our lives!

In this post, I am going to help give you ideas to help you celebrate friendship in your own scrapbook pages. There are so many different approaches that can help you tell stories related to friendship … the easiest, in my opinion, is to start with simply documenting the important friendships in your life. The closest friends, the ones who really make an impact in your life. I wanted to be sure to document my daughter’s close friendship with Lilah who is, without a doubt, her favorite friend. They’ve consistently been friends for the three years since we moved to our town and they definitely share something special. I created the layout below to celebrate this very important relationship.

Another fairly easy way to document the friendships in our lives is to tell the stories about the get togethers and events that we attend with our friends. In the layout below, Pamie tells the story of a birthday celebration and uses this photo which gives us great insight into their friendship! We all attend a lot of events with friends so be sure to get those stories into your scrapbook pages!

In our digital world, many of us spend a great deal of time working on staying in touch with our friends around the world. Some of those friends are people we’ve met but some of them may be on-line friends. This is a great thing to document in your scrapbooks! In the page below, mommyish has created a page about the long distance friendships she has and celebrates how friendship really knows no distance!

Another way to tell your friendship stories is to document your friendship milestones. If you’ve had a friend for many years who has really been there for you, be sure to celebrate that milestone with a page like the one that Sabrina has created below about her 8 year friendship!

I  think that it is a great idea to create scrapbook pages about your friends’ admirable qualities – what are the wonderful things about your friends that make them so indispensable to you! Stacia’s layout below demonstrates how great it can be to honor the great things that our friends bring into our lives!

Before I finish up, I thought I’d share a few more ideas for friendship pages that will help you to celebrate the friendships in your life –

1. Document your friendships with your pets – the animals in our lives are definitely our friends!
2. Tell the stories of your childhood friendships – those early relationships are some of the ones that most affect who we become as adults! Be sure to include those friends in your scrapbooks!
3.  Friendship isn’t always easy – be sure to tell the stories of how friendships have faced adversity! It’s important to document the good and the bad of the things that come at us in life!
4. Create pages about the contrasts between friends – is one of you quiet and the other one outgoing, for example? Those contrasts can tell us really interesting things about one another!
5. Don’t forget to document the friendships that you’ve experienced in specific settings – friends at work, friends on sports teams, etc. Even if a friendship doesn’t go beyond a particular setting doesn’t mean it’s not important!

I hope these ideas will help you to add more scrapbook pages to your albums that celebrate friendship and all that it brings to our lives!  I’m hosting a challenge over on the forums at The Digital Press and I hope you will come play along!

About the Author: Amy lives in Reston, VA with her husband of 14 years and their 10 year old boy/girl twins. Their 19 year old daughter has just completed her second year at West Virginia University!  Amy has been scrapbooking since the early 1990s but discovered digital scrapbooking in 2005 when her twins were born and has primarily scrapped digitally since that time. She is passionate about telling her family’s stories and documenting their life together! Amy is a huge reader (mostly literary fiction) and is a pop culture junkie! She also LOVES all things beauty & makeup!

Scrapping about what is seasonal can be a lot of fun. You can scrap about food, places, festivities, weather, activities, emotions and so much more. Right now, in the month of June, it is becoming very warm here on the west coast of BC (unseasonably warm actually) and the markets are overflowing with fresh produce. The torrential rains we had in May are over and June has brought a lot of sun, heat and an abundance of blooms. It has been so hot this week that I dug out our plastic pool, filled it up and Taz and I splashed around in it to cool off. Here’s a page I scrapped about Taz and the pool.

Scrapping about the weather can include the temperature, how your area looks, how does it make you feel, etc. This photo I scrapped was from my daughter-in-law’s property and how it looks in June. It becomes so green and lush, and evokes such a peaceful state of mind. Here’s a page I created and I think you can agree that it’s a lovely area. When I look at that photo I can almost feel that breeze and the sun beating down onto the field.

Other topics might include what festivities are going on during the current season, what you are looking forward to this season, or even what doesn’t appeal to you about the season. Other seasonal topics could be local foods that are available in your area, recipes you are curently cooking this season, etc. I know I’ll be scrapping some pages about our back porch BBQ’s and some of the summer salads I’ve been making.

I hope I’ve given you some ideas on seasonal topics. Have fun scrapping and head over to The Digital Press Challenge Forum to participate in this month’s challenge, “Celebrate The Season“.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Rae Clevett is a CT member of The Digital Press who enjoys scrapping photos of the gorgeous BC coast, her family and dog, Taz, as well as landscape and macro photos. She believes scrapping goes hand in hand with chocolate and a good TV show.

I love this month’s word and the celebration of everything from milestones to everyday life.   But mostly, I love celebrating my family. Part of my joy is documenting the past and my family history.

Documenting my heritage and family history keeps it alive in the present and for future generations.  For example my husband’s kids love to look back to see how he appeared when he was their age.

Even I catch myself gazing back at my family wondering in awe about how they lived and how I could have adapted.

I have a mountain of Family Heirloom photos and vintage photos of myself and siblings that I love looking through.  I have started scanning them and creating digital scrapbook layouts.

My hope is to create Albums for my parents and siblings for Christmas Presents.

I used Kim B’s Moment’s in Time Collection and Simply Tiffany’s 1504 Templates to create this page celebrating my Paternal Grandmother. I loved her so much growing up. She passed away when I was 18 so I get didn’t get to know her as an adult, but I know I inherited so many of her personality traits.

Stacia created this gorgeous layout celebrating her Grandmother.

And I just love the vintage layout created by Alina celebrating a family moment.

So, how about you? Do you have a collection of heritage or vintage photos of yourself  you would like to scrap?

I’m hosting a challenge over on the forums at The Digital Press and I hope you will come play along! Check it out at The Drawing Board: Challenges. See you there!

About the Author: Lindy Krickbaum is a Creative Team Member here at the Digital Press. She is a happily married wife and best friend to her twin sister. She currently lives in Johnson City, TN.  Lindy is a self-admitted scrapaholic, rarely missing a day to scrap. She also enjoys designing jewelry, reading and going to the beach every chance she gets