Homemade Custom Placemats

Creating homemade custom place mats for each member of your family is a fun way to connect. It is a lot of fun for your kids to choose their themes and items they want on their place mats.

Let the fun begin – what I like to do first is name placement. Then you can add the stickers around. Sometimes on the back of the place mat I put the alphabet or numbers as a border. I even use shapes (i.e. circles, squares and triangles) as well as colors – thus creating a learning mat.

I use a lot of my scrap booking items - stickers, die cuts, pretty much anything. It is also fun to use a picture of the person (I made place mats for my primary class one year. I just took a photo of each one of them, printed them off and created a place mat which had their name, photo and stickers of what they liked.) It turned out to be a nice surprise for them as well as their parents. This is pictured below -

My kids have used their place mats for play dough and painting. Mostly we use them to sit as a family for meals. It is a lot of fun.

It is a simple – yet fun gift to involve your kids in making for someone special.

Try it – let me know what you think!

12x12 Graduation Momento Card

Graduation day has come and gone. Hooray!! In the weeks leading up to our daughters graduation from high school - I found myself pondering just what I was going to do for her in the way of a card. I definitely wanted it to be something special - a sort of a way to show her how she had changed over the years. Of course, all those school photos that had been taken of her from kindergarten to present. I could finally put them to use - some of the older ones haven't been hanging in the house for what seems like forever. I used my favorite program - photoshop and created this card. I placed all the photos and labeled them with the grade and year it was taken. Then I used some scrapbook paper and finished the front off with heart shaped fasteners and silver alphabet stickers for her name.

The inside of the card I wanted to drive home the real point of how she has grown - how appropriate to use her baby photo from the day she was born and her most recent photo in her cap and gown. My husband and our other two children each wrote our own little message on paper and stuck them to the card. I used a wonderful scripture on vellum to add a little more meaning to the page.

Basically, I wanted Kayla to have a good starting point for the scrapbook she can now create for herself.
I am pleased with the finish product - what do you think?

Graduation Announcement

Our oldest daughter is graduating from High School!!! We can’t believe it – Time sure does fly by. As we were approaching the deadline for graduation announcements to be ordered through the school – I couldn’t quite grasp that with all the computer technology we have now, the schools are still ordering the same ole foil graduation announcements that have been used for twenty plus years. We decided to give our daughter, as well as friends and family members a Graduation announcement that would be one to remember for years to come. We put several photos of her from her years in high school – created a template in photoshop added some commencement information and there it was. Our daughter has a custom announcement to hold on to as a keepsake from her youth.