A Year in Pictures

Occasionally I blog about my other passion:  Scrapbooking!  My dilemma was that life was getting so busy, that I really haven't had time to indulge my creative scrapping side.  Meanwhile however, photos of all that we do in a year were piling up.  I decided that there had to be a better way for me to create beautiful pages of all these events without taking up a ton of time.

As our main living area is open concept, we have one large wall that sits between our family room and the kitchen.  I have had a variety of plans of what I would like to display on this wall, but nothing seemed to pan out.  I was shopping in Walmart one day and came upon these beautiful frames for only $10 each in the clearance section.  They were the approximate size of a scrapbooking page (12" x 12") once the matting was removed, and there were 12 left.  A plan instantly formed in my mind as I hurriedly loaded these into a cart!

Employing the help of my husband Greg and using his laser to ensure the nails were lined up perfectly, we created 4 rows of 3 frames each.  Then I set to work creating pages!!!  I chose mainly one big event per month and framed it.  Now I have 12 completed pages that cover pretty much all we did in 2013, and have since gone on to create other pages for the months where we had lots of events.

My biggest fear as I was halfway through this endeavor was that the wall would end up looking messy with the explosion of colours and variety of photos all in one space.  However, once they were mounted on the wall, the neutral colour served as a perfect backdrop to highlight all of our family and friends that are featured on these 12 pages.  Everyone enjoys revisiting the past year's events by looking at the pages, and now that we have completed January 2014 and almost February 2014, I am going to replace the two months up on the wall with the current year so this acts as a perpetual calendar!!!

What I love most about this is that we all get to enjoy my scrapbook pages since they aren't shelved away in albums.  When we finish a month, then the page gets taken down and placed into an album for the year, but not without being thoroughly enjoyed first!  The only thing I worry about now is that the pages might fade out with the indirect sunlight...but the benefits far outweigh the negatives in my mind!!