Teacher Appreciation Layouts - Layout of the Week

This week is a very important week in schools all across America!  It's Teacher Appreciation Week!  This week was a huge deal in my daughter's elementary school.  And it still is!  Even though she's moved on to  middle school and her brother doesn't start elementary school until next year, I was asked to pitch in during this special week.  I'm sure it doesn't hurt that I work our local scrapbook store.  Those volunteers know just who to ask when these projects come up!

One of the mom's at the school came up with the idea of having each child in the school (about 600) create a scrapbook layout for his or her teacher.  Some kids also created layouts for the "specials" teachers: music, library and technology.  In an effort to include the office staff in this fun project, a mom contacted me and asked me to design pages for the principal and the three ladies who work in the office.  Of course, I was delighted to help.  These ladies were part of my and my daughter's life for six years and will be a part of my son's life for the next six years!

When I thought about what types of layouts to create, I was looking for something simple & graphic, that I could reproduce pretty easily for four people.  I think that the teachers will be receiving albums full of pages from their students.  I'm not sure exactly how my layouts will be presented to the office ladies, but I think they would be perfect in frames to hang on the wall.

I am really excited that our store will be getting the retail version of Project Life very soon and so I thought I'd create a PL style layout for these projects.  I also have a few fun ideas that I'm going to start designing soon to sell in the store and on etsy.  I'll be back with details, once the products are ready for sale.  So I had some ideas floating around in my head that I wanted to try out.

Our store (Whimzee's Scrapbook Studio in Beaverton, Oregon) sells tons of custom paper for local schools.  We order our paper from Scrappin' Sports, and of course, my elementary school is one that we order.  Check with your local scrapbook store if you'd like to create a project like this at your school.  I'm sure they have a vendor who can create custom paper for them.

Our school colors are red and black, so I stuck with a red, black & white theme for the layouts.  I used American Crafts textured white paper and World Win non-textured black paper, along with stamps by Technique Tuesday and ink from Tim Holtz & Ranger.  The cute black chevron washi is from Glitz.  I used my Silhouette Cameo to create custom PL style cards for the pages too!

A parent provided me with the photos.  Most were horizontal, so for three layouts, the horizontal layout worked perfectly.  For the fourth layout, I used two vertical photos and turned the layout 90 degrees, printing and cutting my rectangles vertically.

These layouts were a lot of fun to create!  I think I'm going to use this idea as a Teacher Appreciation gift in the future!  Create a layout and grab a white or black square frame & you're set.  I even created cards for a 5th layout, so I can make one for my daughter with a couple special photos from her last day of 5th grade!

Check out my fun idea and TONS of other amazing ideas over at the link party on Today's Creative Blog!  Tuesday is 'Get Your Craft On' day!  You'll find SO many cool ideas there every week, you'll wonder why you hadn't found it before!  Oh, be sure to tell Kim (Creator & Diva of TCB) HI and that Julie from JulieChats sent you!