Thursday 6 September 2012

Back To School Photos

As an avid Scrapbooker, one of the essential milestones to document, of course, is back to school. This is a big year in our household because our youngest starts Junior Kindergarten! Wahoo! I am definitely not one of those clingy moms who spends the first day of school vacillating between chocking back the tears and twiddling my thumbs!

I digress... In honour of the kids going back to school, I decided to make some photo props to help me record the momentous occasion.  I was, as usual, inspired by a Pinterest discovery you can check out for yourself here (for the polaroid frame) and here (for the chalkboard callout).
I took a few pictures of my process, because I took a couple short cuts and adapted the concept to what I had on hand. For the polaroid frame, instead of using wood like the inspiration blogger had, I used a large piece of cardboard. Using some mad exacto-knife skills and a tape measure, this is what I did.


The inner square is approximately 20 x 20 inches. The outer edge measures 28 x 31 inches, meaning that the border is 4 inches along the top and sides and 7 inches on the bottom.

I then spray painted the whole thing white. I used high gloss paint, but found that the coverage wasn't great, so I switched to matte finish for the first coat and then went over that in a second layer with the high gloss.

I saved the square that I cut out of the centre to make my call out. Once I'd drawn and cut out the shape, I simply spray painted it in matte black (because the matte finish is more chalkboard like).


And there you have it... two simple photo props that I'm sure we'll be pulling out on multiple occasions to spruce up the milestone photo shoots, especially those for which I want to record an important detail like name(s), age(s), silly quotes, etc.  

By the way, the words were all added digitally (i.e. no actual chalkboard paint was required, nor was exceptional penmanship thanks to dafont.com)!!

Have a happy 2012-13 school year!



2 comments:

  1. So so cute! Someday your kiddos will be thrilled that you have this captured for them :)

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    1. Thanks Rebecca! I hope so... I am a scrapbooking addict and I like to think that I'm not only doing it for myself, but for the kids to be able to look back on the memories. I just sat down with them last night and looked through my book from a trip to Disney from 2005, when my oldest was just one, and they seemed to enjoy it! It makes all the effort, time, and money worthwhile!!

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