Talk about Parent-Pressure!
My daughter’s school is having an Open House this week, so her teachers asked the parents to make collage boards with three panels of photos of the child from birth to present, their favorite weather, and their family. We had just gotten back in town Sunday evening, so I really had to get on it because well, I’m not much of a crafter or scrapbooker. And secondly, this is no small board — it took me over 6 hours! Maybe because I’m a graphic designer I felt added pressure, I don’t know. But I do know that I was thinking all last night as I worked on it, well, at the very least I’ll have to make a blog post out of this (grrr)! Here’s the finished product:
I was good about taking photos at the beginning, but then forgot towards the end. The steps…
Tearing up pieces of construction paper and (thankfully, I had on hand) art paper:
Using my daughter’s crayola paints and cheap brushes to do a quick “sky” treatment at the top of the board:
Pulling out the hundreds of photos that I have yet to put in an album (this is a theme with me, I fear):
Cutting away, which was difficult to do! I’m so spoiled on the computer, I can play with cropping and layout and colors. Here I just had to go for it. No time to waste. Eek!
Writing captions with a black permanent marker — this part was actually fun, but I messed up at the beginning and was about to call it a night!
The sun took me a while to figure out. I tried a circle, a spiral, a grouping of crescent shapes…everything looked super cheesy. But I think this solution works well: basically I cut a bunch of strips in varying lengths and widths, started from the outside with the thinner strips, and worked my way towards the center with the larger pieces.
The dogs were an “oops!” as I realized I left them out of the family flower (poor puppies). But it allowed me to make a “park” theme out of the center panel that ended up working perfectly to fill up space and get this darn thing done!
I added the numbers by the butterflies in the morning before I took her to school as a last-minute effort to fill up more of the empty space. This was not my most well thought out project, let’s just say that…
But my daughter loved it and went about naming everyone and everything in it. So for me, it was a huge success even before taking it to her classroom. Time well spent?
Really cool project! You didn’t miss much at the Oscars.
I adore it. What a nice keepsake to have. Display it in her room or tuck it away for later. She will be so happy to have this down the road!
Great Job! I decided early on that I would not be keeping all of her projects, therefore I just take photos of them. I also learned that you need to dispose of those items when she is not paying attention. They just magically dissappear. :)
Thanks all for the kind words. This is my first Open House as a parent, I guess I’m a little nervous! Don’t want to embarrass the kid. LOL