8,208 Miles

Over eight thousand miles before his first birthday, wow!  I wanted to document how many miles he flew and how frequent the travels were, not just because it’s fun, but I wanted to document why we did it.  My father was battling cancer, which we knew was terminal in the very beginning.  What’s the best way to cheer up a new grandpa?  So we brought my son to see his grandpa almost every month until my father passed away in his sleep.  I didn’t want this page to be too sentimental and grave, so I just touched on it.  There will be another layout(s) documenting his grandpa.

The inspiration for this page is actually from a magazine:

Inspiration for this layout. I like the idea of a ruler in the layout.

Sketch

Captioning directly on photos help clean up the layout. I especially like white font over dark background, it's the catalog style.

Below: I’ve always wanted to sew on my layouts, and this was my first attempt.  I don’t have a sewing machine so I just hand embroidered.  I pre-poked the holes with a puncture tool.  I have a sculpture tool set but of course you can use anything sharp you have, even pins will do.  I measured the distance between the holes, I think it was 5mm, 2mm, 5mm…  I didn’t want the holes to be evenly spaced out because I want the dashes to be separated.

I made those tickets in photoshop.

Below: I really like this pack of corrugated alphas. Unfortunately it came with one 8. I think it has multiple 1s and 0s, but just one 8! Believe it or not, I wasted half a day trying to figure out alternatives. I thought about buying another pack, and I went as far as putting it into my shopping cart. But I didn’t want to wait and I didn’t think I’ll be able to use these alphas that much so I didn’t want to buy yet another pack. I ran through all my other alpha stickers and thought about changing my background cardstocks to accommodate other alpha designs. This took me FOREVER only to come to the conclusion that this layout will ONLY work with these background papers and this set of alpha. Irrational I know, but scrappers understand me, right? I even thought about rounding up or down one of the trip miles so I get a different number, like 8,206 or 8,207. But the tickets were all made, printed and cut, and I don’t feel like altering the fact on my scrapbook layout, even though I know the miles per trip is just an estimate.

Guess what my solution was? Look closely, can you tell? One of the “8″ was a “B”. Even I can’t tell which is which, ha!

Corrugated alpha provides more texture

Supplies:

Cardstock (right): Bazzill Kraft

Cardstock (left): not sure… will look up

Corrugated alpha: Jillibean Kraft Corrugated Alphabet

Travel stickers: Imaginisce Passport to Adventure Bon Voyage Canvas Stickers

Border with numbers: Crate Paper Toy Box Collection

4 Comments

  1. Min-Hsao Chen wrote:

    Amazing… your work is just amazing. I love it. 8208 miles before one. He will have a Silver Status before me… ha ha ha :)

  2. soapHOUSEmama wrote:

    Beautiful LO – and so much planning before hand – very inspiring!

  3. Erica wrote:

    Great idea! You can’t tell it was a B. brilliant. I should try and figure out how many miles my son traveled. He’s a frequent flyer too though not as many miles as your son.