Craft Night

Hello there!  I got together with a few people for a craft night last week, and I thought I would share what I made there.  Last month, my boyfriend and I took his son to StoryLand, in New Hampshire.  My mom gave us the trip as a Mother's/Father's Day gift.  I don't have any vacation time this summer, so we pulled the boy out of 3 days of Pre-K.  I figured he wouldn't miss too much since it was the week before school ended.

So anyway, I'm making a scrapbook of our first little family vacation!  I only finished 2 pages during craft night.  I was helping my cousin, also one of my best friends, use the Cricut for her first time to make a baby shower card.  I was going to debut my new Cricut Expression, but I didn't notice the blade wasn't in it so I lugged it over to my mother's for nothing.  Typical me.

In April, I went to Cape Cod on a girls' trip.  I found a scrapbooking kit filled with woodsy papers, cardboard embellishments, and stickers at the Christmas Tree Shop there.  It was only $7, so I bought it 2 months in advance of our trip.  I remembered going to StoryLand as a kid and I knew the theme would fit well for the scrapbook I wanted to make.  I went to the website on the package, but I wasn't able to find it on there.  Here is a picture of all that was included:

The first page I made uses 1 of the cardboard embellishments from the kit, the deer.  The "cherish the moment" sentiment is a sticker from the kit.  I put it on a couple of layers of card stock to make it stand out more.  The paper is from the kit also.  I used white card stock as a mat for the pictures.  You can't really see the photos so well from the picture but I used a photo of the outside sign, one of the inside sign, and a photo of the little guy with a sign that reads "You are now entering a storybook world. Follow this path and it will lead you well." signed Mother Goose.

The second page isn't meant to go with the first.  I have almost 150 pictures from this vacation, so I'm making the pages as I come up with layouts for them.  I'm not doing it in order.  These pictures are all from the first real ride we went on, called Whirling Whales.  He loved it and just giggled the entire time.  You can see in the photo on the bottom left that he's giggling, but unfortunately the photo is blurry because the ride was moving.  I used stickers from that scrapbook kit to spell out the name of the ride.  I used lavender card stock as the mats because I thought it brings out the purple from the whales on the ride.  I could not find whale stickers anywhere, so I cut out 6 little ones using the Cricut Electronic Cutting Machine and the B is for Boy Lite cartridge.  I cut the first layer with the same lavender as the mats but colored them with a blue colored pencil where the water is coming out of the blowholes.  They're supposed to look kind of like they are whirling.  I was nervous cutting something so small, but I'm happy with how they came out.  I used white colored pencil to make the whales' eyes, but I might go back in with white gel pen to make it pop more.

As I have been learning for the past 3+ years, doing anything with an Autistic child is rarely simple.  We were a little nervous about taking our first trip.  It involved a 7 hour drive up to New Hampshire from Rhode Island.  (It should have been about 4.5 hours but our GPS led us an hour in the wrong direction.)  It involved staying in a motel, obviously a strange place for him.  And it involved a busy, noisy place with lots of stimulation.  I'm happy to say he did great!  That's the main reason I want to record the memories in this scrapbook.  It couldn't have gone much better and I want to preserve these happy memories.  I'll continue to post the pages as I make them.  :)