Hello folks, today is my first Memories Made Easy blog post, this will be a series of monthly posts on the last Monday of each month, dedicated to photo organisation, Project Life by Stampin’ Up! and anything to do with memories! Today we have a special guest – Sara P – who uses these products to organise her photos yes, but she has also created a new concept, the Gift of Fun which she uses to send very special gifts across the water to her nephews…

Sara says…  I love giving gifts but struggle to find the perfect ‘thing’ because we already have too many things. I want to spoil my nephews but they already have a mountain of toys. A non-toy gift is a great idea but I stalled on the particulars. ‘Experience day’ packages are for older people and cash seems lame. I’m not sure how my brain connected photo organising / scrapbooking / Project Life by Stampin’ Up! to this gift giving puzzle but I’m glad it did!

So I made experience days for tiny people and each ‘gift of fun’ is married with a ready-made photo organiser page to record pictures and stories and keep those memories safe. The ‘gift of fun’ may be a free park treasure hunt with ‘tickets’ for ice cream, but they range from water parks to firefighter museums or messy play recipes and ingredients to do at home. I gave 4 ‘funs’ for their birthday and another 4 ‘funs’ for their Christmas presents. I might give 1 or 2 for Valentine’s Day or other holiday.

My Gift of Fun uses ‘pocket pages’ from the Project Life by Stampin’ Up! range so any experienced or novice memory keeper can quickly slide a few 4″ x 6″ photos into the pockets and be done.

‘Page 2’ is designed to be an index of sorts. I used flappy pockets to make the book interactive for my small nephews. The front of each flap is wrapped up like a parcel with a tag that says which occasion the gift was celebrating. The reverse side of the flap is a small handwritten message like one would write in a card, and the locations for each ‘fun’. There’s space underneath the gift for a completed badge.

Crafty nitty-gritty:
I used the Stampin’ Up! album and the This is the Life card kit. The cards are designed to just slide in the pocket pages for quick and pretty results. The colour scheme on the cards ensures a variety of options that could be a nice picture mount, colourful break or space to write about the event. The album is large, holding pages that are 12″ x 12″ (a common size in the scrapbooking world) with combinations of 4″ x 6″ photos, 3″ x 4″ or 4″ x 4″ cards or photos.

I made a few bits to compliment the bought cards and adapt them to my gift idea.

1- ‘Gift of Fun @’ 3″ x 4″ inch size cards. I designed these with lines so I could hand write the location and details.
2- ‘Find these things @’ I wanted to create a variety of fun things. Some ideas were even free so I thought a treasure hunt would compliment a bit of ice cream money. It was so much fun creating the hunt that I decided to do this for every location. The paper is 6″ x 8″ so it can fold up into a 6″ x 4″ pocket. Each treasure hunt has 6 pictures of things at the location I found using a combination of their websites or google image search.
3- ‘ticket’ pockets – I folded one 3″ x 4″ card onto another 3″ x 4″ card and secured with washi tape. I used my cricut to cut out ‘ticket’ shapes and stamped the word ‘tickets’ using the rotary alphabet by Stampin’ Up! {Pip – you could also use the retired Ticket Duo punch from Stampin’ Up!)
4- ‘Fun had’ badges. I used A4 labels through my printer, 35 per page.
5- ‘flappy parcels’ on page 2, are made using ‘flip flaps’ from ‘Simple Stories’

I’m a crafty girl so this project got increasingly complicated but I’m very happy with the result and I hope my nephews enjoy themselves!

The book seems a bit empty now but I envision pictures of big smiles filling it up soon. More importantly, it will be added to and kept instead of forgotten in a sea of toys.

What an amazing idea? As Sara says, she’s a seasoned crafter and so she had lots of fun making additional items to go in the pockets, but this could easily be scaled down for someone new to the photo organising system; the card sets and photo pockets make it so easy to achieve fast and fun results.

So I hope that Sara has provided you with some amazing inspiration on how you can take your photo organising one stage further to give the gift of fun as well as preserving your memories; now your friends and family can preserve them too!

If you’d like to purchase the This is the Life card kit or any other of the Project Life by Stampin’ Up supplies, please click on the images of each product below to go straight to that product item in my Shop, I’ve selected a few items that you might like (different sized albums / photo pockets / card kits or full bundles including stamps at 15% off), and today I’m launching a new Giveaway Code for some FREE Itty Bitty Accents Epoxy Stickers worth £3.75 as a special thank you for ordering online. Use the code below at the checkout.

Have a great week and chat soon, thanks for stopping by, from Pip & Sara!