Those Quickly Passing Baby Days

It’s a good week when you find one of your layouts featured on the October Afternoon blog. OA featured the layout below, "Welcome Baby," of my son as a newborn.

The blog link is here: http://octoberafternoon.typepad.com/october_afternoon/2011/06/flickr-feature-vol-2.html

And it’s an even better week when you find a layout of your son at age one in the pages of Creating Keepsakes.  My layout, "Oh, How The Days Flutter By,: is on p. 70 of the July/Aug 2011 issue.

Oh, time, you are swift of foot. The baby years go too fast. Much too fast. How I miss those sweet baby days. Those days when my little one was soft and warm and malleable and I could swoop him up and hold him close and he wouldn’t protest and he wouldn’t squirm away. And he wouldn’t look at me funny if tears dropped down my cheeks in awe of this tiny creature and in wonderment of being his mom. But he is my big boy now. A toddler. And he’s wonderful in his own right. But there is a tug, always a tug, for the baby he once was.

A Summer-themed Project

I am primarily a layout maker, but I really do love to absorb myself in altered projects every now and then. I had the best time playing with Echo Park’s fun summer lines and a Tim Holtz configurations box for this project. This is the finished box.

And here are the steps I used to make it.  When, I opened the package, I found an outer box with a lid and several small inner boxes. You can configure the inner boxes in different ways or you can leave some out as I did. 

First, I used a thin layer of inexpensive white acrylic paint from a craft store to white-wash the inner boxes and outer frame. 

Next, I pulled out some mists from Tattered Angels, tested the colors on plain white paper flowers, then began misting the box. I laid some netting over one corner as a mask.

The last step was to gather some journaling cards and stickers from Echo Park. I used three different lines: Summer Days, Little Boy and Playground, putting things at different layers and heights in the box. Then I borrowed a white convertible Matchbox car from my son for the bottom right and raised the car on foam squares.

After the inner boxes were decorated, I glued them in and covered the project with the frame I had misted. The last step was to add a few Echo Park stickers to the outer frame. Below is a more detailed look at the left and right sides of the configurations box.

This project was featured on the Echo Park blog on 6/2/2011.  You can find the EP blog entry here:  http://echoparkpaper.blogspot.com/2011/06/i-spy-echo-park.html#more