I'm Kris, proud mommy to Harmony (11.5 yrs old) and Avery (5.5 yrs old). I live in the suburbs of Ottawa (Canada's capital) with my kids and my hubby of 7 years. He works full-time and I am a part-time SAHM, part-time WAHM. We are enjoying living in our brand new home, which was built last year. Our favourite things to do together are our Friday-evening "Family Movie Nights", playing board games and card games, and of course doing crafty projects!
I have been scrapbooking since my daughter was about 1 year old so over a decade now! I have always loved being creative and most of my hobbies now involve some form of crafting... Besides scrapbooking, I also love card-making, cross-stitch, home decor projects, creating blinkies and siggies, as well as graphics design. My blog, Creating Kris is a collection of pictures and instructions for basically every project or layout I do these days! ;)
As far as scrapbooks go, I have completed over 2 dozen albums over the past ten years!!! I have one album for each chronilogical year (e.g. "Family 2002, 2003, etc.), as well as baby albums and birthday albums for each child. I also have a Wedding album, a Grad album (my spouse and I got professional photos done when we finished up our 4-year university degrees), and a small album dedicated to our 3 angels. For our Christmas pictures, I have been able to fit about 3-4 years in each one, and have just started our 4th album. And lastly, each child has a school album that will go from Kindergarten to the end of middle school.
I guess you could say I feel very strongly about my role as our family's "memory keeper", eh?! The best reward I ever get from all the time and energy I put into scrapbooking is whenever one of my kids has asked to look at one of their albums... or in the case of my preteen these days, sneaks a peek at one when she thinks I'm not paying attention (I guess scrapbooks aren't as "cool" to her now!)! I hope that long after my kids have grown up and moved out, they can always enjoy flipping through the old photos and journaling to find out what they were like as children and to have a sense of family tradition.
These days, my biggest challenge is feeling "up to" doing some creative work... unfortunately I was in a car accident in 2008 (my 2nd time being hit by a careless driver!), and although the accident was less severe than my first accident (which I recovered quite well from), it left me with chronic pain. Even though many of my injuries have healed, I still have severe pain that is constant and unrelenting - even to the strong medications I'm on. Even sitting up to do some scrapbooking has now become a major undertaking, so I definitely am not as caught up on my albums as I used to be. I ended up switching to digital scrapbooking for my yearly Family albums, so the only books I have the pleasure of working on in a traditional scrapbook are the Christmas album and School Years albums.
It's one of my child's school albums that I wanted to share with the readers of the "Ideas for Scrapbookers" blog, so I hope you enjoy it! I was very thrilled to hear from Pam that I would be one of this summer's Featured Artists and I thank her so much for the honour of having my work displayed here! I hope that my layouts can infuse some fresh ideas for the readers! My work is not super-fancy and I don't always spend major bucks on all the latest supplies and materials, but I always scrap right from the heart because I know my two favourite little people in the whole world will be my main audience! :)
Don't forget to visit her blog here: http://www.krismom.com/
And check back in a few minutes for her neat layout idea!
Thanks so much Pam for the opportunity to be a featured artist! :) I'll be letting all my friends know about my post here and linking to your great scrapbooking resource blog! :)
ReplyDeletehave a great day and great weekend!
~krismom