Our Family Stories Album

One of the better classes I took at CKC was entitled "Making Ordinary Extraordinary." The concept was to create a beautiful mini-album out of brown envelopes and I think we definitely succeeded.  You can see the slideshow below.  All the products are from the SEI Moravia line. For the class, we were given a kit with nearly all the papers pre-cut and a complete set of full-color step-by-step instructions.  SEI is very good about this sort of thing and we've used their album kits for baby shower activities in the past.

In this case, we did not quite finish the album in class, but were able to quickly complete it at Chrissie's house. I did wait until I was home to bind it as my Crop-a-dile makes this so much easier.  Basically, it is able to punch through about half these pages at once and then sets each eyelet with a gentle push. I love how finished the binding looks when there are eyelets reinforcing the holes. 

You will, of course, notice that the album is lacking pictures.  It took me awhile to decide on a plan for it, but I have settled on a Family Stories album.  My concept is that whenever I, or others, record the stories of our family in blogs or elsewhere, I will print them off and put them each in an envelope.  On the page facing the envelope, I will include a picture of the people involved in either the telling of the story or the story itself depending on what I have available.  I am thinking more stories of our ancestors (Grandparents and further back) than I am of our day to day stories for this album.  So, if you have a family story from any of our branches to tell please write it up for me (or for those of you who prefer the oral tradition tell it to me and I'll write it).  Then, I will add it to our book. As it is just envelopes and paper I can find relatively easily I can likely expand it as needed or create another if stories present themselves. Sound fun?  I'm pretty excited and hope it will be a good way to preserve our stories as well as being very pretty!

During the class, Chrissie was already thinking up 10 ways to use the concept in the future and I was dubious if I'd make another envelop album, but am already converting as I like to tell longer stories and this seems like a great format for that!