Hi,
My apologies for the long silence since my last blog post.

Here is one more idea on a simple but cute scrapbook.

It was Aarav’s birthday, my 3 year old friend 🙂 and Neet ( his mom ) had decided a jungle theme. She is very creative and I am just listing down all the things she had set up for their party. These are only for ideas. I will try to get some pictures.
The decorations : She had cut outs of various animals pasted on the walls. We had some table mats and coasters which could also be used as decorations 🙂
The invite: She made various animal faces with a icecream stick and pasted the invite behind it.
The games: Passing the parcel with the “parcel” having animals and the task was to enact the animal he chooses from the box.
Activity: Animal masks to be coloured and worn.
Cake: animal print matching to the decorations
Now, in line with Aarav’s love for animals, the gift we decided for him was a bag with “mowgli” and “balloo” from Jungle book. Along with this we made a personalised scrapbook. The following materials were used:
  • Glue, printed alphabets, scissors
  • animal print papers
  • blue foam for the clouds
  • green felt for the tree
  • corrugated brown paper for the tree trunk.
  • A crayon coloring book which we normally color and throw away? We used the giraffe from it and also the monkey. Additionally, we used the animals on the back cover showing other similar books and used them on our gift-wrap. 
  • Cutouts / stickers of flowers and some buttons.

Remember that you could substitute any of the above materials with the ones you already have at home. Only try to give it a 3D effect by using more and more layers. For instance, may be using a double sided foam tape for the giraffe would have given a better effect. On retrospection, I also thought, instead of “My jungle book”, I should have simply written “Aarav’s jungle book” and again used double sided tape for effect. Anyway, you can try all different ways which suit your creativity 🙂
                       
See, in the above picture, the cutout green portion from the last page is the grass at the giraffe’s feet and the cutout circle is the monkey on the front of the scrapbook.
For the inside, we made a quick bookmark saying “I love animals”, some heading tags for his favorite memories and a set of animal stickers to decorate the photos or pages with. So, our entire gift was ready. One gift we bought, one gift we made and to both, we added our loads of love.
This idea is not necessarily for the cover page of scrapbooks. You can use it in greeting cards or to cover a box or an envelope. We all love ideas so, let us know if you have used any of these for yourself.
See you soon with more on personalized, simple, DIY gifts.
Rgds,
PoornimaÂ