Week 30 in the Documented Life Project challenges was to: “Add receipts, labels, business cards – smash books style!”

What is a smash book? Maybe like us you have seen smash books and various accessories in your craft store, but were not sure what they were all about. Melinda found a blog post at Crafts Unleashed that made sense of it all. Basically it is a style of scrapbooking for the un-scrapbooker.

Jan:
I’ve got lots of scrapbook stuff from many years waiting to be organized. The problem is I did not want to start digging through it to find something for this challenge that I wanted to put on a small page. I also have not gone anywhere recently (or the week of the challenge) that I would want to “smash”. Grocery receipts were not inspiring me. Instead I decided to make a smash style page documenting all of the states I have lived in over the years. My dad was a teacher and he also loved going to school himself, adding to his degrees. Some of the states I lived in were places he taught and some he was attending school for a year. Many summers we also packed up and lived in a different state while he took summer classes. As a kid I did not like leaving my friends for the summer, but looking back I am grateful for the many experiences and memories living in those places.

Kraft paper was my choice for the background because most of the smash books I had seen were brown paper or chipboard. I cut the states from colors out of a painting one of my grandkids had made (that had torn) and printed the state names from my computer. The road was black ribbon painted with white stripes. I cut out letters and words from magazines and added extra doodle lines.

Melinda:
While organizing my office/craft stuff recently, I came across a pile of memorabilia from my sister’s wedding five years ago. I wanted to do something with it to remember that special occasion, but I gave up on scrap booking when Ninja Boy was 6 months old. I have been keeping it in a box on top of my desk for several months now. When this challenge came up, I knew it was the perfect time to use the stuff! I placed all the pieces of memorabilia and then printed off a picture from her big day!