I love birthdays...

I love birthdays. I love the cake...the cards...the presents...the surprised looks on my boys' faces.

What's not to love about a birthday? Well, the stacks of pictures that seem to pile up after a party is one negative! I realized earlier this month that I have birthday pictures unscrapped for both of my boys going back to 2005. I realized I avoid scrapping birthday parties. I just end up with WAY TOO MANY photos! Then I noticed I have party pics for cousins piled up, too!

So, I decided to pull out a collection of birthday themed papers and scrap until I ran out of paper. The first line I selected was the "Surprise" line by Scenic Route. I've had these papers for months, but hadn't even attempted to use them yet!

I started with Kevin's birthday last fall - his 7th. I was even able to use the negative space from a giant Rusty Pickle chipboard "7". I did painted it up and dotted it to match the papers. The fun felt accent at the top of the page is by Creative Imaginations.
This was the year I realized I took too many photos at birthdays. I tried to cut back on how many I take, but also started doing photo collages to make my pictures smaller. By fitting 2-4 photos on a 4x6 or 5x7, I'm able to get more images on a page like I did in this page also for Kevin's 7th."Lucky Number 7" is a page for Blake's album about Kevin's "friend" party this fall. I completed this page for a challenge by millermath/Debbie over at Personal Scrapper. For Blake's 10th, I didn't have any more of the large chipboard numbers so I improvised and used letters to make a "10" out of a lowercase "L" and "O". By mixing it with smaller mis-matched chipboard letters, I'm hoping no one will ever notice!Both boys got lucky last fall and each had two birthday parties - one for family and one for friends. We won't do that every year!I even scrapped a page about my birthday last year! The "Making Memories" ribbon is acutally packaging off of a Making Memories brand apron that I won as a crop prize! I can be thrifty!

After I finished this year's birthdays (except for Tom's...I'll get to his sometime!), I went back through the photo boxes and made this page for Kevin's album about Blake's 8th. They've both changed SO MUCH!

Finally I made a page with SR scraps of my cousin Emma's party in 2007. It also happened to take place at a benefit we had for my cousin Tiffany who battled brain cancer. It got a little emotional scrapping the group photo with her. I can't believe she's gone. (FYI: "KILL TED" came from the t-shirts/bracelets we all wore to show support as Tiffany fought to "kill" her tumor she named "Ted.")

With the SR Surprise line exhausted, I remembered I had the Basic Grey "Cupcake" line that would also work for birthdays. I scrapped Kevin's '06 birthday party at during his Storyhour at the public library.

Now I'm throwing in a non-birthday layout, but it's cute and one layout I can mark off my to-do list. I don't know how many times I've tried to work with these pics from 2005, only to put them back in the photo box. The Cupcake line had a sheet of paper with trikes on it. I could use that!!!
Back to birthdays...

On a recent trip to Archiver's, I found three sheets of patterned paper by The Paper Company that I really liked. Remember: THREE sheets. 12x12 sheets. REMEMBER that!

First I scrapped these 2 2-page 12x12 layouts for Kevin's album. These photos are from his cousin Dane's party in January 2008.

Then I made a page for Blake's album about Kevin's birthday at home this past fall.
I decided to finally tackle the MANY, MANY, MANY photos I had from Kevin's "friend" party last fall. Luckily I had used a photo editing program to make collages (smaller sizes) before I had them processed!

I completed THREE 2-page 12x12 layouts and a single 12x12 from the friend party.

I love how they all turned out. They were too fun. Remember I did all of these with just three sheets of 12x12 patterned paper. A little goes a long way. (I need to remind myself of that the next time I shop for paper!!!)

I also used a coordinating transparency from the same line to complete a page for Blake's album about his cousin's birthday party in January.

Now I have all of these great times documented and in albums. That feels great!