Creative School Binders

My daughter needs two binders for school. Instead of buying those expensive binders I had the idea of buying plain white ones with the plastic sleeve that you can feed things into. Then we could stamp our own cool binders! So that's what we did! For the first one we wanted to do it like scrapbook pages. She chose some photos of her and her friends she wanted to use and she picked the paper. I kind of took it from there with input from her on whether or not she liked what I had cooking. There was some trial and error along the way with getting the right fit but we persisted. For the second one she didn't really want to do another scrapbook one. I suggested we could just use some fun paper and embellishments. She picked some retired Stampin' Up! designer paper and I took it from there. The great thing about Stampin' Up!'s designer paper is that I could let that dicate my color scheme and have the inks match. I stamped a matching background paper with Whisper White 12 x 12 cardstock and the Seeing Spots stamp set. I used Only Orange, Green Galore, and Pink Passion. For the front I found a stash of paper flowers and buttons and used those down the middle. For the back I found a package of paper cuts of words and images by K and Company. It went together pretty quickly.

Next up was my son Nicholas. He needed a binder too. He really wanted to do his himself. I had a hard time letting go of the project. I let him do most all of the stamping. He picked out the colors with a little input from me. He was very proud of his finished project. Then he started looking around my craft room saying when he grows up he's going to have his own craft room in his house. He wants his own stamps and inks now. He wants to start scrapbooking too. I love that my very active athletic boy also likes to do artsy things. It means he's well rounded.

It was fun going through my mounds of embellishments coming up with stuff to add to these projects. This is one of my favorite parts of stamping. Using them for practical things other than cards and scrapbook pages. My kids now have there very own unique binders. They will have the coolest binders in the school!

I want to leave you with an image of my son from earlier in the evening. He went from jumping on a mini trampoline being superman to finishing up the evening stamping with me. Not to be outdone, his younger brother was the jumping hulk with a move uniquely his own. You gotta love it!