birthday crafting

so my dad turned 60 yesterday – happy birthday dad!!!

we were lucky enough to have him visit last weekend to celebrate his birthday. i was pretty unsure what to get him for such a big day, since i suspect he has most things he wants or needs. so i came up with the idea of creating a scrapbook where each family member who was interested made a page. i think the idea worked really well.

i have a standard size i make for large photo albums – about 15" wide x 11" tall. so i used one of those book board covers. i ordered large pieces of cardstock from paper source and cut them down to be the inside pages. i used two shades of green and two shades of blue. then i packed each one into a big envelope (with a piece of cardboard to keep it flat), really

open directions for things you could do to your page, and a return label to me. i sent one out to each family member who 'e'd me back that they wanted to participate.

everyone was really good about getting their pages back in time – which helped. i also designed the book to be held together with screw posts so that i could open and close the binding at any time to add pages. i took a shot of each page as it came back – that way

everyone who participated got a sense of what the whole book looked like. i posted all the images on my flickr account.

my dad had a great time looking through the book. some people wrote out stories, a bunch of us decorated with photos, one of my cousins wrote a story and made him a CD with music – the pages were really personal and i think it was a pretty gift.